< Back Everyday Resurrections: The Divine Pattern of Healing and Transformation Hadassah Treu "Do you know that as a human being created in the image of God, you can experience everyday resurrections as part of God's pattern of healing and transformation?" Do you know that as a human being created in the image of God, you can experience everyday resurrections as part of God's pattern of healing and transformation? God has given us the abilities, the opportunities, and the means to experience new growth, renewal, and transformation in the places marked by death and loss. Jesus Christ is the Risen Lord, the Lord of Resurrection and Redemption, and the Giver of life. If this life flows through us, so does His resurrection power. Daily resurrections are the divine answer to loss and trauma. Life on this earth is a chain of small and big deaths: the death of things, relationships, dreams, and people we deeply treasure. How do we deal with death? How can we overcome it? What is the way God has provided for us? The Divine Pattern of Darkness and Light, Ends and Beginnings Since the beginning of creation, God has implemented a divine pattern of night and day, death and resurrection, destruction and renewal. This is the divine cycle of ends and beginnings, transition, and change. We find this pattern in the first chapter of Genesis. "God called the light 'day,' and the darkness He called 'night.' And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day." (Genesis 1:5, NIV) The first day and all the days after that start with the evening, followed by the night before the morning sun rises. First is the night, and then comes the day. This applies to creation, but it is also true for our lives. A day, a season, or a period starts with darkness: the darkness of physical or emotional pain and suffering in various forms. We go through a dark night of the soul, losing something we value or struggling with rejection, disappointment, doubt, anger, loneliness, and failure. Our hope dwindles, and our joy diminishes. But a new day is coming, for "weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning" (Psalm 30:5, NIV). The Creator of the night and day, the darkness and light, will not withhold His life and mercy from us. Dawn comes right after the darkest hour of the night. The best moments happen when we’ve already given up hope and don't expect anything. Sudden joy rushes through our veins, triggered by a child's smile, a meeting with a stranger, a gentle hug from a friend, the stunning beauty around us, or unexpected good news. Surprised, we can feel joy again. We fill our lungs with the breath of fresh life. We dare to hope again. Perhaps you've lost the hope of building a family of your own. Don’t give up: today may be the day to get acquainted with your future partner. Perhaps your dream of having a successful career as an artist has died. Don’t pull it away from your heart: today can be the day of a new start. Or you've lost hope of seeing a loved one healed and free from addiction or of mending a broken relationship. Don’t stop putting your hope in the God of the Impossible. If He could roll the heavy tombstone and let His life and light shine again in the dark grave, He can do this for you, too. His mercies are new every day, and so are our possibilities to experience the renewal of our souls, bodies, lives, and relationships. Every morning, we open our eyes, resurrected from the "small death" of sleep, to experience God's fresh mercies. Again. The Promise of AGAIN This is the code word of everyday resurrections. God has encoded this word in nature and the recurring seasons, in our making, and in His mighty word. Do you know God gives 15 "again" promises in the Book of Jeremiah, chapter 31? Jeremiah gives these beautiful restoration prophecies immediately before severe disasters befall Israel. Even before death and loss strike, God wants Israel to know that He has a good plan and is working on how to restore the people. He gives them the powerful promise of "again" as a stable foundation of hope for redemption and a good future. The foundation and the guarantee of our daily and eternal resurrections is God's everlasting love: "I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness." (Jeremiah 31:3, NIV) When we are in the deepest of sorrows, God doesn't abandon us but thinks about how to deliver and restore us. He always has a plan. Here are several promises of restoration and renewal containing the power of "again": • Again, we will be rebuilt. (verses 4, 28, 38)• Again, we will be given comfort and joy instead of sorrow and will be like a well-watered garden. (verses 4, 12, 13)• Again, we will be delivered and redeemed. (verse 11)• Again, we will be satisfied with abundance and God's bounty. (verse 14)• Again, we will be blessed and turned into a blessing. (verse 23)• Again, we will know the Lord on a deeper, intimate level. (verse 34) How Does God Resurrect Us? The first way God brings us to life after experiencing a valley of the shadow of death in our lives is by giving us a roadmap for our future based on His promises. When we take this roadmap to heart and start trusting it, we begin to heal and develop positive expectations for the future. When we let these specific promises speak into our present circumstances, we can start living with the expectancy for God to move and fulfill His promises. The second way God breathes life into our shattered souls is by resurrecting our joy and hope. Joy is the pulse of life. The Holy Spirit hovers over and fills the voids in our souls with fresh joy. This is not a superficial, fleeting joy, but the powerful current of God's love and sovereignty. He draws our attention and opens our eyes to see and behold our eternal, living hope. This enables us to live in the present and what is happening now. We can find the strength to let go of the past and embrace the new life and all the new things God does in the present moment. And by doing so, we heal. And we change. When we focus on the present day, and on God's constant and loving presence, we are ready to receive our daily resurrections because "this is the day which the Lord has brought about; we will rejoice and be glad in it" (Psalm 118:24, AMPC). Resurrection Is a Transformation Our healing from trauma and loss and the daily renewal of hope and joy are no small miracles. However, the biggest miracle of the resurrection is that God doesn't just bring dead things to life. No, He transforms them in the process, giving them new nature and characteristics. The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is a powerful example of this. His resurrected body has a completely different nature than His fleshly body. It went through a powerful metamorphosis. Jesus' body was transformed into a heavenly, immortal body with which He could stand on the right side of God. This is what we are looking for at our final resurrection, too. We are longing for our eternal and final transformation. Mortal into immortal. Death into life. Sorrow into joy. Weakness into glory. In God's perfect timing, He will redeem all our deaths and the ultimate death, and shape something new and beautiful from the dust. Till then, we will again experience joy, comfort, satisfaction, blessings, and the most precious thing—a deeper and intimate knowledge of the Lord. Till then, let's count our daily resurrections. Image: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on oak panels. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Hadassah Treu is an award-winning author of "DRAW NEAR: How Painful Experiences Become the Birthplace of Blessings," poet, speaker, and motivator, author of 2 poetry books, and co-author of 13 devotional and poetry anthologies. She loves encouraging people to draw near to God in the dark valleys of life. She has been featured in The Upper Room, (In)Courage, Proverbs 31 Ministries, Today's Christian Living, and others. Connect with her at onthewaybg.com, and on social media @onthewaybg and @hadassahtreu. Previous Next

What books does the editorial board of Aletheia Today mogazine recommmend? Check out what we're reading this summer. Additional Reading What a re we reading? Check out additional reading about philosophy, theology, science, and culture for young and old alike. For the young and hungry for knowledge... Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link 1/1 For the young at heart and still learning... Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link Go to link 1/1

< Back The History of Problem Solving David Cowles Jan 10, 2025 “Gradually, our sticks became ICBMs and our canopies became high rise condos but the process of problem solving remained unchanged.” In the beginning there were problems: hunger, cold, fear, etc. So we looked around to see if there might be something in the environment to help: Could a stick or a bunch of leaves make a difference? What if we sharpened the stick at one end and used it to keep wild animals away? What if we wove the leaves together to make a kind of rain shelter? And so technology was born. Gradually, our sticks became ICBMs and our canopies became high rise condos but the process of problem solving remained unchanged. Call it the 4 I’s: (1) Identify a problem/need, (2) Imagine a solution, (3) Inventory raw materials, (4) Implement. This last stage includes 3 steps of its own: Make (or manufacture), Measure, Modify. The 4 I’s accurately describe the problem solving process from c. 50000 BCE to 2000 CE. Since 2000…not so much. Specifically, AI has changed the paradigm. Now for the first time, we are implementing before we are imagining. Take the atomic bomb for example. We wanted to kill people and destroy infrastructure. Based on the known science, we reasoned that a certain configuration of specific materials would give us a device that would meet our needs. So we built it, tested it, and deployed it. Now we have a different problem. We need to become smarter…quickly. Who knows, if we do get smarter fast enough, we may find a way for us to stop killing each other; but I digress. 20th Century : We know how computers work now. We know how to build machines that perform many of the functions we call ‘thinking’. This technology is helpful, but it can only do what we tell it to do. It can’t ‘dream of things that never were and ask why not’. (Robert Kennedy) 21st Century : We’re learning how minds work. We know how to build ‘artificial minds’ but now we don’t build them to help us accomplish specific tasks. We build them to see what they can do: we test them, learn from them, dream with them, and hopefully deploy them in some useful capacity. What’s changed? Everything! Our machines are no longer our servants; they are our peers. The question is, can they become our overlords? Would they want to? We can’t know for certain until we’ve lived together and learned as much as possible about each other. The things we’re saying now about our AI bots are very much like the things we used to say about Missy and Junior. For example, we don’t really know how our bots learn or how capable they can become. But fortunately, we have centuries of Pedagogical Science to draw on. So we throw a bunch of info at them and see what sticks. Brilliant! But just like our flesh and blood, our bots can surprise us. Two years ago, researchers at OpenAI were teaching a bot to do arithmetic. They gave it examples: 1+1, 1+2…2+1, 2+2… They wanted to know how many examples AI would have to see before it was able to generalize its knowledge and apply it to new problems. They went home discouraged; but by accident, they left the training program running in the background over the long weekend. When they came back Tuesday morning, the bot could immediately solve any problem they threw it: “27543 + 62895 = 90438, obviously.” (It took Missy 7 seconds… and she got it wrong!) Another time, those same researchers came in on a Monday morning to discover that their bot had taught itself French and had decided to do its arithmetic in French rather than English. Clearly, the bot was not learning cumulatively. It was ‘grokking’; it was learning via a series of ‘aha!’ moments. Learning is not like swimming; it’s like leaping from one lily pad to another. Anyone who has spent any time studying human cognition, or just hanging out with kids, knows that we grok too. How many hours did a parent, teacher, or tutor stand over me trying to get me to understand some arcane concept like long division, only to have me shriek out suddenly, “I get it!” I was always surprised when I returned to school in September to find that I was ‘smarter’ than I’d been when I left in June – and that was before the days of summer reading lists. And I will never forget the first night I dreamed in French. ( Problem : I still speak better French when I’m dreaming than I do IRL.) Do you grok? I certainly do. What’s happening with our bots? “Lots of people have opinions,” says Lauro Langosco at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But I don’t think there’s a consensus about what exactly is going on.” For all its runaway success, nobody knows how—or why—AI works. The biggest models are now so complex that researchers are studying them as if they were naturally occurring phenomena, carrying out experiments and trying to explain the results. A bot learns to do a task by training with a specific set of examples. Yet it can generalize, learning to accomplish that task using data they’ve never seen before. Somehow, AI bots do not just memorize patterns; they come up with rules that enable them to apply those patterns to new situations. How is it that bots can (1) figure out that the data they’re memorizing forms a pattern, (2) understand that the pattern exemplifies a general set of rules and (3) apply those rules appropriately to new data sets? When we answer those questions, maybe we’ll also figure out how to educate Missy and Junior. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Civilization is Discontent David Cowles Jan 8, 2026 “Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair.” 1100 words, 5 minute read. Life is simple! Eat, sleep, have sex, and stay alive. For almost all species, tool use, if any, is situational: grab stick, hit hive, eat honey, discard. The tool does not become a ‘thing in itself’. Winnie the Pooh does not think to put his Rube Goldberg contraptions into a museum. Christoper Robin on the other hand… Eve ate the proverbial apple in search of knowledge – a brave if costly choice. But in expelling Earth’s First Family from Paradise, God got the last laugh. From the get-go, the need to nourish, rest, procreate, and survive stimulated the emergence of a Technosphere, an amalgamation of tools and techniques intended to facilitate the human project. Genesis tells us that Abel tended sheep while Cain grew veg, at least until he went off to build cities. (Apparently, the authors thought that the sedentary life of a farmer was more conducive to urbanization than the nomadic life of a herdsman.) In Eden, God protected his intellectual property via statue (Don’t Eat the Fruit). Post Eden, humanity is on its own (“everything is permitted” – Dostoevsky), but no bother – God can rely on us to build nearly impermeable ‘physical’ barriers between ourselves and gnosis . To begin, we make a fetish of our tools. They become things in themselves and we house them in museums to celebrate our achievements. ( True art cuts the other way – it pierces the veil. Here’s a simple test of artistic authenticity: Does this open-up the ineffable to me…or is it just another brick in the epistemological wall? We are unable to see the forest for the trees. We have devised a highly non-linear ego-centric model of the World. Whatever is closest to me in space and time takes on an outsized importance: my family, my ‘garden’, my nation, my planet, my ‘day’. We see the World as if it had been built by Escher. (Perhaps it was?) We form social groups: our families, our neighborhoods, parishes, clubs, unions, etc. and we endow each with almost mystical significance. That ‘manufactured mattering’ obscures the real communities behind them. Manufactured mattering leads us to adopt false and empty Values, the ‘idols’ of the Old Testament under a new guise. I refer, of course, to our twin desires for fame and fortune. Longevity masquerades as eternity, security as peace. Ingeniously, we build economic systems that positively enslave us. Marx was right: we’ve gone from plantation slavery to wage slavery. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” ( The Who ) Then we fine tune our economies to ensure that the vast majority of us, around the world and throughout history, remain in a perpetual state of want so that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) Socialism, capitalism, it makes no difference: we all live just below our own personal (floating) poverty line. Technology threatens the structural integrity of our cocoon. It develops geometrically and might soon outpace demand: Marx’ surplus. But ‘we’ are way too smart for Karl. We endlessly proliferate needs to exceed ever so slightly our accelerating ability to satisfy them. Supply will never catch up with demand. There is no such thing as ‘surplus’ in our world. Every so often, some ‘goodie two shoes’ (me?) comes along shouting, “Live simply that others may simply live.” But the relentless expansion of the catalogue of available goods and services makes a simple lifestyle unattractive. “’Tis the gift to be simple,” according to the Shaker hymn adapted by Aaron Copeland for Appalachian Spring ; but how many Shakers do you know? Culture is another symptom, and engine, of Civilization. On the one hand, it is a method of recording and preserving our advances toward Truth, but on the other, it forms a forbidding barrier, shielding Truth from experience. We acculturate our children, i.e. we train them to be the people we wish we had been. We prepare them for life…our life. We train them to fight the last war. Kultcha projects the past into the future and protects us from having to live in the present. We are always one generation out of sync. As further protection against the possibility of a satisfied citizenry, we have invented yet another ring of fortifications: Society - a new pantheon of needs, e.g. recognition, honors, social status, and fame, i.e. things that make us feel good about ourselves. We must feel good about ourselves; we crave it at all costs – which is why cyberbullying so often ends in self-harm. At the bottom of this particular rabbit hole, lies the mother of all delusions: our nearly universal desire to ‘leave the world a better place’ - as if we could know what’s ‘better’ beyond our immediate environs, and as if we could ‘make it so’ if we did. Add to that a litany of activities, euphemistically known as ‘hobbies’ (hobbles?). For example, many of us devote two days a week to a pointless pursuit known as golf . We hit a ball and chase after it like a dog playing fetch; from some vantage points, we must appear mad. Yet, we gladly trade family and career in hopes of a pewter cup at the end of the season. And those of us who can’t do, root. We rely on a team of professionals to do our ‘doing’ for us. Like bourgeois draftees during the Civil War, we pay others to perform in our place. We live and die for the Yankees and the Knicks, though most of us will never know George Castanza, or anyone else connected to either team. Every weekend, New Yorkers sit down to their TVs and joust with their peers in Boston and LA…Philly, Frisco, and Chitown if they’re slumming…virtually. We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons and yet we cling to the illusion that “there will be time…there will be time for all the works and days of hands.” (Eliot) And so we create bucket lists – things we want to experience ‘in the living years’, things we will remember, things we may record in journals or on photos, things we can share with others via social media…until the memories flicker out and the records decompose. How diabolically ingenious! Driven by our unquenchable thirst for sweet gnosis , we have erected virtually impregnable fortifications ( aka civilization) to protect the ‘pearl of great price’ from our probes. Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair – “nothing beside remains…boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley) *** Giorgio de Chirico — The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a deserted cityscape where elongated shadows, rigid architecture, and an unseen threat create a sense of unease beneath apparent order. A small child and a rolling hoop introduce movement and innocence, contrasting with the oppressive stillness and suggesting a world governed by hidden forces rather than human logic. The painting embodies metaphysical uncertainty, inviting the viewer to sense an underlying truth that is felt intuitively but never fully revealed. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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Aletheia Today celebrates winter writing through process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays. Addressing questions like "Is God real?" and "Does Heaven exist?", this issue offers a thoughtful exploration of the spiritual and scientific aspects of holiday celebrations, encouraging a harmonious dialogue between faith and reason. Inside Our Winter Issue Philosophy I Seem To Be a Klein Bottle “I am what the Universe sees when it looks in the mirror.” Should I Vote? “What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!” Robert Frost “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods; only Frost can ‘walk this way’.” Determinism…or Entanglement? “Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.” Theology A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." Culture & The Arts Mythology Before Marvel Comics “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” The Science Behind the 7-Second Rule "First impressions swiftly shape neural pathways, steering our social interactions through rapid cognitive processes." Home Alone “Macaulay Culkin is ‘every boy’ and his Home Alone family is ‘America’s family’ – except it’s not!” What Are Farm Animals Thinking? New research is revealing surprising complexity in the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock. Spirituality Mamisoa In the heart of poverty, a community's spirit shines, defying limitations, and embracing hope against all odds. Finding Light: A Prayer for Wisdom and Forgiveness Embracing clarity, forgiveness, and purpose Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back How Moses Saved Egyptian Civilization “…Walk through the streets of Jerusalem, through the marketplace at Mahane Yehudah, and find distinctly Judaized foods, dress, music, and customs from every part of the world.” Tzvi Freeman Chabad.org invites the readers of Aletheia Today to read this article in full by following this link. Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back The Human Predicament David Cowles Oct 13, 2025 “Consciousness is the experience of pre-existing contrasts (sensation) deriving meaning from a shared context.” Sensation may be more or less immediate, but experience is not. Conscious experience requires not only raw sensation but also internal contrast and external context. My senses only disclose the existence of ‘X’ if I can distinguish ‘X’ from ‘not-X’ and if I can locate both ‘X’ and ‘not-X’ in a shared context that makes the contrast relevant. Example : the contrast between red and blue is strongly relevant in the context of color while the contrast between the Gettysburg Address and a grain of sand in the Sinai is weakly relevant in the context of something like ‘ things that can be named’. Ducking the important issue of pre-natal consciousness, birth is Event Zero. It is the only time in our 80+ year long existence that we will encounter ‘novelty’ per se . Everything is brand new…by definition. To be clear, every one of our NLE’s c. 10^12 ‘experiences’ will be novel, but that novelty will consist of a specific contrast in a specific context; only at the moment of birth do we encounter naked novelty . Contrasts are immanent in experience! They are binary and linear. Specific contrasts constitute the essential substructure of any one experience. However, the semantic meaning of an experience, its defining superstructure , always transcends the experience itself. That meaning is derived from context which by definition is neither linear nor binary. A contrast has no meaning apart from a context and a context has no relevance apart from a contrast. It is through an immanent contrast that the transcendent context makes itself felt. The defining contrast(s) of an experience are an essential component of the experience itself. The semantic context of an experience is never part of the experience; it transcends it, i.e. it gives the experience its meaning . If ‘experience’ is a legitimate application of Gregory Bateson’s famous ‘difference that makes a difference’ criterion, then ‘context’ constitutes the limits of that differentiation. Given X and not-X, contrast is what distinguishes them and context (what they share) is what ‘unites’ them. In effect, contrast and context template each other on an axis perpendicular to ‘experience space’: contrast is the anti-context, context is the anti-contrast. Whatever is not contrast is context and vice versa. Example : Red and blue (above) reflect a contrast in the shared context of color. The concept of color transcends both red and blue but it becomes relevant only through such contrasts (e.g. the contrast of red and blue). Now all this sounds benign enough…but it isn’t! It’s deeply subversive, as Nietzsche was first to notice. Once we concede that an immanent contrast derives its significance from a shared context, we have opened the floodgates. Any context, transcending a contrast, can find itself in contrast with some other context, transcending a different contrast. Extending our example above, if red and blue contrast in the context of color, color can contrast with heat in the context of the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetism in turn contrasts with gravity in the context of force fields, etc. You can see where this is headed! If we’re not careful, some wise-ass punk in the 3 rd row is likely to shout out the G-word and we can’t have that, can we? But not to worry, we’re not there…yet (but we are getting warmer). Nietzsche realized that once transcendence got its nose in the ontological tent, God would inevitably follow. To protect us from this catastrophic assault on our pride, he willingly sacrificed the concept of shared context. Nietzsche’s world is flat! Which is ok, as long as we understand that none of his contrasts have any meaning; they just are. “…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 ) Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Any context can in turn contrast with another context in a shared meta-context. The process should continue indefinitely. But obviously, it can’t! There has to be an Ultimate Context (UC) regarding which at least one of the following statements must be true: (1) UC contrasts with nothing…by definition, it’s ultimate; (2) UC contrasts with itself, it’s ultimate; (3) UC contrasts with everything other than itself - again, ultimate. Note that this Ultimate Context is different from Aquinas’ First Cause. It is not intuitively obvious why there has to be an ‘uncaused cause’ but it is obvious that everything that is - God, Earth, my neighbor’s brat - shares a common context (Being per se ) that is only contrastable with nothing …which is ‘no thing’. But now suppose all three statements are true; then ‘UC’ is essentially synonymous with the Judeo-Christian concept of ‘God’. How so? First, God is incomparable (again by definition); nothing has anything in common with God. God is the ultimate Other (Buber, Tillich, et al.). Second, God contrasts with everything else (Creation) – the context is their mutual incompatibility. Fiat lux is the ultimate contrast; it contrasts Creation and Creator. It is also the primordial contrast: “Conscious experience consists of a contrast within a shared context. Then God separated the light from the darkness.” (Genesis 1: 3 – 4) It is a contrast per se ! (Everything else is just yada, yada, yada.) Third, God is Process (e.g. Love, History, the Burning Bush); therefore, God includes internal contrasts between personae (persons) and God provides the context from which those contrasts derive their meaning. Conscious experience, wherever it is found in the cosmos, is a hybrid phenomenon connecting immanent contrast(s) with transcendent context. The justly famous ‘human condition’ is a symptom of this dichotomy. To be clear, we are firmly rooted in the immanent world of contrasts. We are the product of 30 trillion independent living organisms (cells) acting in concert. However, our gaze is just as firmly fixed on the transcendent context. Consciousness is the experience of pre-existing contrasts (sensation) deriving meaning from shared context. *** Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930) distills experience into its most essential contrasts—color and line, presence and absence, individuality and order. Through the disciplined arrangement of primary hues and perpendiculars, Mondrian seeks the universal within the particular, transforming visual tension into metaphysical harmony. The painting’s equilibrium between opposition and unity mirrors the human search for meaning within structure, where contrast becomes the very language of context, and simplicity opens onto transcendence. 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 Quantum Theology Mark D. Stucky Spirit filled the formless void before matter and energy were born, before infinitesimal became infinite, when, from a singularity, a speck of nothing, the biggest bang birthed everything. And still the Creator of the quantum realm, on a vast yet subatomic scale, casting loaded dice of probability, nudges particle positions, tuning endless interactions. Apparent uncertainty, indeterminacy, and random chance ultimately collapse into incarnate intentions and divine designs. Causation cascades through the cosmos until: Revealing transcendence, a bush blazes unconsumed, reorganizing natural order, a sea splits asunder, reversing cursed decay, death falls defeated, redeeming moral corruption, hearts strangely warm, and recreating creation continually, heaven and earth entwine. And now…entangled photons…and entangled hearts… commune across distances infinite, yet immanent and intimate, with the Quantum Mechanic, the Cosmic Creator, the God of Abraham, the Spirit filling us. Image: The Creation of Adam, painted by Michelangelo around 1512, is a fresco on ceiling plaster. The artwork measures 280 cm by 570 cm (9 feet 2 inches by 18 feet 8 inches) and is located in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Mark D. Stucky has degrees in religious studies, pastoral ministry, and communications. After being a pastor, he moved into communications and was a technical and freelance writer for decades. During his day job, he documented diverse technology products. In free time, he’s written many articles, stories, and poems on a variety of (usually spiritual) topics. He has received four dozen writing and publication awards. Previous Next

< Back ATM or ATM David Cowles Jun 7, 2022 But OT or NT, is the information fungible? Well, it may not get you a cool ride or an awesome crib, but it might just get you eternal life instead. An Automated Teller Machine (ATM) gives you cash. Well, to be more precise, an ATM gives you back your own cash…subject to a daily withdrawal limit of course. Kind of like when you were 10 years old and had an allowance. To paraphrase the great Danny DiVito, “Banks love money…other people’s money!” But we’re not here today to rake the banking industry over the coals (some of my best friends are loan officers), and besides, we have Elizabeth Warren for that. Back on topic, I stick my bank card into a hole in a wall, push a few buttons and out pops $$$. The individual bills are pretty, I suppose, if a bit repetitive. I guess I could frame one and put it on my wall, but what am I to do with the rest? And 10,000 people just wrote in, “Send it to me!” Why? Because you all know that money is fungible. You know you don’t have to frame it (‘dream it’); you can trade it (‘be it’) for other things – things like Prada, Wagyu, Dom P, and a Batmobile and, oh yeah, I almost forgot, your very own McMansion. A wall hanging for me, a mansion for you. Hmm, I think you got the better of me on this one. And all because you knew that money was fungible! Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) does not give you money; it gives you information; and you know what they say about information? “That and $2.95 will get you a Coffee Grande at Starbucks – and they’ll even throw in non-dairy creamer at no extra cost.” Money is fungible but information is not…or is it? Let’s put together a Brief History of Information (with a tip of the hat to Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time ); and where else should a history begin but at the beginning…the very beginning! Check out these headlines from the Washington Post : “Eve Eats Apple - Trades Paradise for Knowledge.” Paradise = Eden Apple = the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil “Job Sues God - Demands Information.” Bereft, destitute, disgraced, and diseased, Job forgoes a claim for restitution and sues God for Information instead (see The Riddle of Job in AT Magazine , Issue #1 ). “Solomon Shocker: Boy King Chooses Wisdom over Wealth.” “Ask for whatever you want me to give you,” says the Lord. “A discerning heart,” replies Solomon. (1 Kings 3: 1 – 15) This same theme runs throughout the Old Testament (OT). Heck, there’s a whole section of books (seven to be exact) devoted entirely to ‘Wisdom.’ So, what about the New Testament (NT)? There, information does not lie in a set of laws (Written Torah) nor in an understanding of Nature (Oral Torah); it lies in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the logos , the Word, i.e., the structure of information itself. But OT or NT, is the information fungible? Well, it may not get you a cool ride or an awesome crib, but it might just get you eternal life instead. Given the choice, and it is a choice (“You cannot serve both God and Money,” Mt. 6:24), the heroes of the Bible did not hesitate; would we? “I set before you ATM and ATM; therefore, choose ATM!” Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today, produced every Tuesday and Thursday. To never miss a single Thought, subscribe to Aletheia Today by scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting the subscribe option. 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.

“There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” < Back The Ship of Theseus David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “There is only one I am, shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and Rene Descartes (…ergo sum).” It’s one of philosophy’s oldest riddles. Time and tide being what they are, the Ship of Theseus requires constant maintenance, and sometimes that maintenance requires us to replace rotten wooden planks with fresh lumber. At some point, presumably, none of the original wood will remain. Is the vessel then still the Ship of Theseus ? Or is it now a brand-new vessel? If the latter, at what point in the gradual replacement process did the Ship of Theseus cease to be the Ship of Theseus ? When the first board was replaced? When the last of the old boards was removed? Or at some arbitrary tipping point (e.g., when original material constituted less than 50% of the entirety)? Of course, the standard ‘solution’ is to say that the ‘Ship of Theseus’ is the vessel’s pattern (its Platonic form), not its materials. But this raises a new problem: we can build a dozen copies of the original Ship of Theseus, and the original and its copies will all share the same form. Must we then say that they are all the Ship of Theseus ? If so, then we have converted a proper noun (‘Ship of Theseus’) into a common noun (‘ship of Theseus’); what would Sister Margaret have said about that? But this is not just a matter of grammar! By converting ‘Ship of Theseus’ to ‘ship of Theseus’ we have moved from a unique, discrete, material object to something immaterial and conceptual, i.e., to a ‘class of objects’ (whatever that may mean). In other words, ‘Ship of Theseus’ and ‘ship of Theseus’ are even less alike ontologically than they are grammatically. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they have nothing to do with one another! Perhaps a problem shrouded in the mists of mythological time isn’t compelling your interest. How about something closer to home then? How about your precious body, yup, that body - the one you build on weekdays at the gym and polish on weekends at the spa? That body is made up of more than 30 trillion living cells, virtually none of which you’re directly aware of. These cells have an average life expectancy of 7 years. Therefore, your body, like the Ship of Theseus , is undergoing perpetual replacement. So then, when are ‘you’ no longer you ? Another problem. You were conceived at the fertilization of one ovum by one sperm cell. One particular ovum, one particular sperm. That’s you …sort of. But what if the same act of intercourse between the same two partners (your biological parents) resulted in the fertilization of a different ovum by the same sperm cell, or the same ovum by a different sperm cell, or a different ovum by a different sperm cell? Would ‘you’ still be you ? Or would you be the sibling of the person you otherwise might have been? Dizzying! And we’re just getting started. Whoever you are, you have millions of virtual siblings (potential combinations of sex cells from the same two partners) and maybe a handful of actual siblings. However much you may share traits with these siblings, virtual and actual, the truth is that you’re not the slightest bit like any of them. You are you, and they are they; you’re not they and they’re not you. The ontological gap between you and your sibling, even your identical twin, is well, not to exaggerate but… it’s infinite. And don’t get me started on astrology? What if you’d been conceived a minute earlier…or a minute later? What if Mercury just went retrograde? Who and what would you be then ? Obviously, this is an unsatisfactory situation. It results in a proliferation of entities that would make even Ptolemy uncomfortable, not to mention William of Ockham – you know William, lead vocalist for the heavy metal band, Occam’s Razor ? The alternative is to accept the uncomfortable conclusion that each human individual is a unique, emergent phenomenon, ontologically unrelated to any other phenomena, actual or potential, no matter how apparently similar they may be. But this ‘solution’ has its own issues. I am looking out at the audience during a lecture I’m giving when I notice that about half a dozen of the folks are, like me, a bit on the ‘plump’ side. I am tempted to say that ‘plumpness’ is an attribute we share but that would be wrong. Each of us is plump in his or her own way. Plumpness in me is unrelated to plumpness in you. My doctor has just put me on a strict ‘heart healthy’ diet while you’re carbo-loading for a part you’re playing in an upcoming film. It is thanks to human rationality and ‘the language tool’ that a concept like ‘plumpness’ can be abstracted from a handful of unrelated phenomena to become the description of a certain imaginary class of objects. In fact, each of us is what we are, as we are, i.e., in our own ways. Phenomena (parts) derive their meaning from phenomenon (the whole). You and I both have a small dark spot on our left cheek. For one of us, it’s a cosmetic beauty mark added by a beautician during a recent spa visit; for the other, it’s melanoma. Something has meaning only in reference to something else. Therefore, any whole, considered in isolation, is meaningless. The parts of that whole, however, do have meaning, first with respect to the whole, then with respect to each of the other parts of that whole. An entity, any entity, is an information matrix. “It from bit.” (Wheeler) Wholes seem to be made up of interchangeable parts, but the meaning of each such part is entirely determined by the unique whole to which it contributes. Therefore, no two parts, no two wholes, are ever identical or interchangeable. Peeling away the layers of this onion is tough work for a sensitive guy. Tears are already streaming down my cheeks, and I have one more, crucial layer left to peel: If you and I have no parts in common, then there are no parameters according to which we can be compared. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” is not a thing after all! You are you, and she is she; the two of you are neither alike nor unalike. Like implies comparability and you two are, believe me, ‘incomparable’. “I am what I am, and that’s all that I am.” ( Popeye ) Likewise, you are what you are, and that’s all that you are. You are not ‘like me’, nor are you ‘different from me’. We are ourselves alone. But the caterpillar, as always, must have the final word, “Who R U?” Because ‘what you are’ and ‘what I am’ have no axes of comparison, ‘who you are’ and ‘who I am’ must be the same thing. It’s just ‘who is’. In the Book of Exodus, YHWH says, “I am.” Who or what? “I am who am.” (Exodus 3:14) The Gospel of John echoes Exodus, but this time it is Jesus speaking, “I am.” Again, no predicate! John’s point, of course, is that the ‘am-ness’ of YHWH and the ‘am-ness’ of Jesus are one and the same. There is only one I am , shared by YHWH and Jesus…and me…and you…and René Descartes (… ergo sum ). Because none of us has any ‘identity’ per se , we are all merely manifestations of a single process – the process that recognizes potential ‘parts’ and uses them to build novel ‘wholes’. We are children turned loose in a junkyard, looking for parts we can use to make a soap-box for an upcoming derby. No two wholes are the same, no matter how similar they may look; neither are any two parts. But the process by which parts become wholes is unitary…and universal. So ‘me being me’ and ‘you being you’ are one and the same thing; even though (actually, because ) ‘what I am’ and ‘what you are’ have no axes of comparability. So questions like, ‘would you be the same person if…?’ have no meaning. Who you are is immutable…and coincident with Being itself; what you are is entirely contingent. You are who you are regardless of what you are. This is why you can never escape yourself, no matter what you may make of that self. But who you are is neant (Sartre). Who you are is not-being what you are. You are process, the perpetual process of not being what you are, of coming to be what you are not. Perpetual, of course, because you never reach your goal: you never become what you are or what you are not. In the words of the pre-Socratics, who you are is Aletheia (Parmenides), timeless and featureless. What you are is Panta Rei (Heraclitus), ‘everything flows’. “Life is difficult” (Scott Peck). You are not God. Being terrifies you; you are in free fall. Your arms flail as you reach for a handhold to break your fall; there is none. The underside of life is your perpetual effort to bury who you are in what you are: “I’m a big boy now, I’m in middle school, I’m a teenager, I’m in college, I have a career, I’m someone’s significant other, I’m a parent, I’m on the Board of Selectmen (sic), I’m a grandparent, I’m retired, I’m at rest (Rabbit)…I am dust.” What you are is always just exactly what you are, but it is never who you are! You are not like anyone else; you are everyone else. Image: A Fresco from Pompeii depicting Theseus and Ariadne escaping from Crete. According to Plutarch, the Athenians preserved the ship that Theseus used to escape, by replacing the parts one by one as they decayed. 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 Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back ‘Happy Holidays’ vs. ‘Merry Christmas’: A Twist Dr. Stephen Stern "The argument for the “Happy Holidays” greeting is that because Christians have been imperialistic, and have erased everyone else (including Jews) from American culture, they now need to include us." Before Omicron directed my social life, I went to a Christmas party. a.k.a. “holiday party,” at which everyone was boosted and outside. It was brisk, but not cold enough to keep friends from being together. The hosts greeted me with, “Happy Holidays,” to which I said, “Merry Christmas,” and held them hostage to my lecture on why I hate the greeting, “Happy Holidays.” I was the only invited Jew. Their flustered faces and stutter conveyed that “Happy Holidays” was to help me feel included. I apologized too late. I had ruined their greeting. How should they greet me? Better yet, if one doesn’t know I’m Jewish, is it offensive to wish me a Merry Christmas? Yes and no. It’s complicated. Here’s what is going on for me. “Happy Holidays” confuses inclusion with equality. The idea behind replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” is that there are minority groups in America, e.g., Jews, who are not included. “Happy Holidays” makes Hanukkah the Christmas-equivalent. But this is a false equivalence, and it not only does a disservice to Jews, in wrongly elevating Hanukkah to the sacred, but also by diminishing Christmas, robbing Christians of something that is valuable to them. The argument for the “Happy Holidays” greeting is that because Christians have been imperialistic, and have erased everyone else (including Jews) from American culture, they now need to include us. But does including us demand that Christians must be punished by not being allowed to have anything Christian in the culture anymore? If we want Christians to stop erasing us Jews, Muslims, Hindus among others, does the greeting “Happy Holidays” erase the Christians themselves? Is the general wishing of Merry Christmas an assault against Americans of other traditions or no traditions? Many Jews in my world wish to hear “Happy Holidays.” Greeting them should have nothing to do with Christmas. They want no association with a tradition celebrating the robbing and distorting of Judaism’s face. For example, a colleague’s dog received Merry Christmas wishes on Facebook. My colleague responded: “My doggies don’t celebrate Christmas, but they would like to wish you a happy belated Hanukkah!” At another spot on the December-Jewish-greeting spectrum, Jews with trees seem fine with Merry Christmas. Like Halloween, they explain, Christmas is a secular holiday. One might say that their celebration of Christmas is old school. It has nothing to do with Christianity. Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa are not similar holidays. Conflating Kwanzaa with Christmas in the US seems misguided. Southern enslavers justified enslaving black people through the story of biblical Ham violating his father, Noah; antebellum southern whites argued it destined black people to be enslaved as descendants of Ham. Crazy, right!?! They justified white Christian genocide in the name of a Jew, brown Jesus of Judah. Ham was also brown, but not Jewish. Sarah and Abraham spark the origin of the Israelites. Hanukkah comes over a thousand years later. It celebrates the re-creation of the fourth Jewish state in 166 BCE, when Jewish rebels killed a lot of assimilated Jews. We don’t mention that when we light our hanukkiahs to bring light into the world. Furthermore, it’s not a religious holiday. Jews do not make religious/sacred holidays out of military victories. Jews thus do not desist from ordinary activities and work on Hanukkah. So, what we should say at this time of year to Jews? The party hosts said, “Happy Holidays” to be inclusive. However, more inclusive inclusion knows the holidays at the time those around us celebrate. Hanukkah has been over for a month. It is Christmastime in the states, not Diwali, not EID, not Rosh Hashanah, not Bodhi day. It’s Christmas, a US federal holiday. A great majority of Americans from differing ethnicities celebrate it. Ironically, Jews are now included as a December holiday player, just as I was greeted at a Christmas party with “Happy Holidays.” Chabad (a Hasidic sect) lights an annual hanukkiah on the White House lawn, some Jews have trees, a Fox News host recently said a Christmas tree is also a Hanukkah bush, etc. Is it any wonder Christians and non-Jews think Hanukkah is the Jewish Christmas? Let’s stop pretending it is. Let’s wish Christians and atheists who descend from Christianity a Merry Christmas. As for Jews with trees? If you want them, Tu Bi Shvat is coming. And for Jews like me, “Hi!” This was republished from The Times of Israel with permission from the author. 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. Previous Next

< Back Renga Cycle 1 20th century Western literature familiarized us with a writing style known as ‘stream of consciousness.' In this genre, writers simply record their thoughts (or pretend to). Result: we read as if we were thinking. Seven centuries earlier, Japan began experimenting with a ‘call and response’ style of poetry, created and transcribed collectively by a group of poets. Typically, the Renga-Master kicks-off with a three-verse, 17-syllable Haiku. Then another poet adds either another Haiku or, more traditionally, a Tsukeku (two verses, seven syllables each), as a response. If we credit the 20th century with the ‘stream of consciousness’ (Freud influenced) writing style, we must credit 14th century with a ‘stream of collective consciousness’ writing style (anticipating Jung). The Renga format is not rigid. For example, a second Haiku could occur before the first response. This is what’s happening in the Renga below, kicking off ATM’s Japanese Poetry Slam . Renga Cycle #1 Drip, drip goes the water How I wish I could use it To wash the world away. (Basho) One caw of a crow Turns all of the fallen leaves A deeper yellow. (Wright) (Please add your response in the comment box below. It can either be a 17-syllable Haiku or a 14 syllable Tsukeku.) David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue Your content has been submitted Add to our haiku in the comment box below.