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< Back Entropy The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. David Cowles The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. Share Previous Next

< Back Fantasy Football David Cowles Sep 1, 2025 “Patrick Mahomes is a great player and thus should be your first pick, right? Wrong! Fantasy isn’t reality, where winning NFL games matters most. Focus on projected points instead of Super Bowl rings…” (Mike Hume, New York Times, 8/31/2025) Just like real football, Fantasy Football (FF) has a lot to teach us about real life. In How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team , I looked at the real life qualities that make a team successful, whether on a football field, or a Hollywood lot, or in a corporate board room. Successful teams are not built by assembling a locker room full of great athletes. Great athletes tend to be ego-centric; often they are all about their own stats. Winning games is a secondary byproduct of playing well. Even if that’s not the case, great athletes can have an inflated sense of their own importance. I was part of a ‘team’ once where each of the 4 members thought that he was the most important player on that team and, from each’s perspective, he was not wrong. Needless to say, things did not go well for that ‘team’! You cannot build an undefeated football team by combining parts to form a whole; you must start with your concept of the whole and then curate ‘parts’ conducive to the holistic success of your team. Of course, IRL things are rarely this simple. IKEA like, you often find yourself stuck with a pile of ‘must use’ parts before you even begin to build out your whole…and we all know what happens if you end up with unused pieces. To build a winning team IRL, you must work from the whole to its parts. First ask yourself, what would a winning team look like? Then, what are the components needed to foster such a whole? Now go build your roster. Truth to tell, IRL there are no ‘parts’, only wholes… and wholes within wholes . Each player is a whole, a unique synthesis of a variety of physical attributes, acquired skills, and mental attitudes. It is how those attributes combine to form the whole, and how that whole contributes to the meta-whole (the team) that gives each player his unique value . Wholes cannot be compared based solely on their component attributes. Obviously, objective ‘facts’ cannot be ignored but it is how those facts fit together to form a whole (the player) within a whole (the team) that creates value . Sidebar : This is an illustration of the fundamentally non-Archimedean structure of the real world. According to the Euclidean model, ‘B + C = A’ means the same thing as ‘A = B + C’; IRL two statements could scarcely be more in conflict. The former assumes that parts form the whole, the later assumes that the whole curates component wholes to function as its so-called ‘parts’. Such a ‘part’ cannot be evaluated by comparing it to other parts. It derives its value strictly from the synthesis of its own attributes and from its relationship with the whole that embeds it. In high school, certain teachers ‘graded on a curve’. The top 10% received A’s, etc. A student’s ‘value’ was entirely a function of her comparative relationship with each of the other students in her class. But how Student B compares with Student C is virtually meaningless, except in environments intentionally (i.e. artificially) structured to be ‘competitive’, e.g. school. IRL the ability to cooperate usually trumps the ability to compete. Remember your high school class? Did the top students go on to have the most successful lives? All of them? And what about the kids at the bottom? All homeless or in jail? Didn’t think so. What confers value IRL is a student’s mastery of the material in question and the way in which that mastery is deployed to enhance the value of some meta-enterprise. Between mastery and value two syntheses need to take place: the synthesis of attributes to form a whole (the player) and the synthesis of wholes to form a meta-whole (the team). Sometimes being in the middle can be a curse: Middle Management, Middle Child, etc. Other times ‘middle’ can refer to a golden mean: Middle Earth, Middle Ages, Middle Class, Middle Voice , for example. This is yet another application of Gregory Bateson’s iconic meme: “A difference that makes a difference.” A player is not simply an accumulation of attributes; the synthesis of those loosely related attributes into a tightly structured whole is Difference #1 . Likewise, a team is not an aggregation of players; the synthesis of those individual players into a single organism (team) is Difference #2 . A difference that makes a difference – this is the source of all value...among other things. Once upon a time, I was part of a team that built a business from scratch. We developed an algorithm that significantly and persistently reduced the cost of health benefits relative to the quality of the care they funded. The Holy Grail? Not so much. When it came time to sell our business, only a few buyers were interested, i.e. those companies that could leverage the intrinsic value of our algorithm to support their own broader enterprises. But back to football! Real Football is a paradigm of the holistic model. Fantasy Football is the opposite. In FF, you build your team by ‘drafting players’ off of a meta-roster. Once the season starts, each player is evaluated each week based on his statistics for that week: x points for a completed pass, y for a mid-field tackle, z for rushing over a specified number of yards, etc. The sum of these values for each player are then added together to create your team’s ‘value’ which you can then compare with the ‘values’ your friends created with their rosters. Fun…but it’s the opposite of what real football is about. Note that no extra points are awarded to a player for his ‘special effort’ that saved a touchdown. No points are awarded for the value of your player’s leadership skills. No points for ‘doing his job’. (Bill Belicheck) Question : Would the combination of players that wins your Fantasy League have even a winning record in the real NFL? So, should you use your #1 draft pick on Patrick Mahomes? If you own a real NFL franchise, then probably yes; but if you’re just fantasizing…then probably no! *** Thomas Hart Benton’s Football (1942) depicts a tangle of powerful, exaggerated figures whose individual bodies only make sense in relation to the whole contest of the game. The painting illustrates the very point that real football—and real life—cannot be reduced to a sum of parts; value emerges only through the synthesis of individuals into a coordinated, living whole, something Fantasy Football’s stat-driven model cannot capture. 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< Back AI and the Quest for Humanity’s Answers Josef Flintlock, AT responses by Editor-in-Chief David Cowles "AI will virtually obliterate the barrier between what can be known and what is known." The dawn of the artificial intelligence era has cast a spotlight on the tantalizing prospect of discovering answers to humanity's most profound questions. As ChatGPT and other AI technologies advance, the question arises: will these digital marvels truly hold the keys to unlocking the mysteries that have puzzled philosophers, scientists, and thinkers for centuries? AT : It is unlikely that AI will move the border separating what can be known from what is fundamentally unknowable. But AI will virtually obliterate the barrier between what can be known and what is known. This essay embarks on a journey through the realms of knowledge, humor, and philosophy to explore whether ChatGPT and AI are destined to become the ultimate oracles of wisdom. In a world where Google knows our favorite pizza toppings before we do, the allure of ChatGPT having the answer to every question is both mesmerizing and hilarious. AT : The centuries old mystical doctrine of Kabbalah distinguishes Understanding (Binah) from Wisdom (Hokhmah). Understanding shades over into knowledge (Malkhut) so I expect AI to vastly expand our understanding of most everything; whether it will demonstrate or confer wisdom is something else again. However, even in the age of AI, the notion that these digital entities will hold all answers is akin to believing that wearing a cape will make us superheroes. AT : What would make us superheroes? The complexity of human inquiries, infused with nuance, context, and cultural intricacies, presents a challenge that even the most advanced algorithms struggle to master. AT : True today, but the attraction of AI is the possibility that it will eventually be able to mimic humans’ capacity for nuance and that it will adequately integrate context and cultural norms into its process. While AI might provide extensive data-driven insights, it remains an evolving tool rather than a universal panacea. The Dance of Subjectivity and Philosophy Imagine asking an AI to resolve the age-old question: "What is the meaning of life?" ChatGPT might earnestly reply with an eloquent response, citing philosophical treatises and scientific theories. However, the beauty of this query lies in its subjectivity—a concept that AI struggles to encapsulate. AT : If AI is to fulfill its promise, it must be able to mimic human subjectivity. Pre-AI, algorithms are objects. The challenge for AI is to behave in a way that convinces us that it is its own subject. (Turing Test) Re the meaning of life, it’s true, I wouldn’t expect much from today’s AI. But then again, how well has Non-artificial Intelligence (NI) done with this question? The multifaceted nature of existence, tinged with personal experiences, emotions, and interpretations, evades AI's binary world. AT : Is there a world that is not at some level binary ? A motion picture is made up of static frames. Could the same not be true of every apparently continuous phenomenon? Calculus was supposed to have proven the ‘reality of continuity’; in fact, it only provided us with a tool that allows us to ‘treat’ stochastic phenomena as though they were continuous. In this dance between the objective and the subjective, humans stand as the choreographers, utilizing AI as a partner to enhance the performance but never completely define it. The Comedy of Errors In a whimsical twist, the comedic potential of AI attempting to provide definitive answers to humanity's grand questions cannot be overlooked. Picture an AI offering advice on matters of the heart or rendering artistic critiques—it's like asking a potato to compose a symphony. AT : I have no doubt that AI could do a better job for the lovelorn than either Dear Abbie or Anne Landers! Whether AI can recognize and/or create Beauty is an open question addressed elsewhere in this issue. Hot Link And in defense of our much maligned spuds, please don’t overlook the Lyonnaise Polonaise . The inherent limitations and occasional misunderstandings of AI can lead to responses that are hilariously off the mark. AT : Yup, “Kids say the Darndest Things” (Art Linkletter) That’s how we learn…and how AI will learn too. While AI's missteps are a source of amusement, they also emphasize the uniqueness of human cognition and the importance of embracing imperfection. AT : Perfection is a myth (at least in spatiotemporal systems) and unhelpful as a measure of value. An element of ambiguity is what makes the strongest algorithms what they are (‘fuzzy’) – and that’s how our minds work as well…especially after a night spent drinking ‘adult beverages’. The Uncharted Seas of Discovery As technology progresses, AI's role in uncovering insights cannot be denied. AI's capacity to sift through vast amounts of data and identify patterns has contributed to scientific breakthroughs and innovative discoveries. AT : Our brains have been curated by natural selection for over a half a billion years; as a result we are pattern generation and pattern recognition machines. That said, AI will soon blow past us…if it hasn’t already. Patterning has conferred enormous selective advantage on all sentient life forms and AI will take this to a whole new level. Some contemporary cosmologies understand the Universe as nothing other than a hierarchy of patterns: e.g., fractals, holograms, The Matrix . Yet, the act of seeking answers extends beyond factual information—it encompasses the exhilarating pursuit of knowledge, characterized by curiosity, experimentation, and the thrill of the unknown. In this regard, ChatGPT and AI can act as guiding stars, offering directions in a limitless universe of exploration. The notion of ChatGPT and AI possessing all the answers to humanity's greatest questions tantalizes us with visions of a digital sage with boundless wisdom. AT : Is there nothing new under the sun? How about the Oracle at Delphi? Hal 9000? However, this vision is a blend of comedy and philosophy, highlighting the intricate interplay between AI's capabilities and the uncharted depths of human inquiry. As we navigate the landscape of knowledge, we find that while AI augments our journey, the thrill of discovery lies not in having all the answers but in the pursuit of questions that lead us to new horizons of understanding. AT : AI can save us from the tedium of data determination and interpretation (Binah, Understanding); will it free us up to focus on the meta-patterns (Hokhmah, Wisdom), the meaning of it all. So, let us welcome AI as a companion on this profound expedition, embracing the laughter, the wisdom, and the mysteries that lie ahead. A connoisseur of both AI technology and the intricacies of human inquiry, Josef’s writing seeks to bridge the realms of science and philosophy in a way that both informs and entertains. When not penning essays, you can find him lost in a book or simply enjoying the laughter that accompanies life's absurdities. He has written for Honeywell, Medium, and Elephant Journal. 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 . 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< Back Life After Death David Cowles Mar 23, 2023 “Once alive, always alive, but not always alive in time. Life, at least conscious life, is not time bound. You’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound.” “Do you believe in Life after Death?” “Do you even hear yourself? Life after Death ? After Death? What is death other than the cessation of life? How can life come after it? Death is death. It’s not a nap.” “So you’re a nihilist then?” “Of course not. I don’t believe in ‘Life after Death’ because the concept doesn’t make sense to me, but I do believe in ‘Life after Life’, or better yet, ‘Life beyond Life’.” I’m 75 years old! If only I had a nickel for every time I’ve reenacted this scene… Sometimes I feel as though the world is divided into three camps. The first group, we’ll call them Hummingbirds , believe in Life after Death. The second group, Crows , believe some version of ‘you live, you die, end of’. And me, and maybe you, we’re Sparrows . The problem is with the word ‘death’. It appears to be a quite ordinary common noun . One might even say, a very common, common noun . Just try going a whole day without using it even once in a sentence! ‘Death’ is a common noun that allegedly means either ‘end’ or ‘transition’. It means neither; in fact, it has no meaning at all. Death is a phantom word; it is an example of what Alfred North Whitehead called The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness . We imagine that something is ‘really real’ when in fact it is only ‘real’ as a concept in our minds. Think of an Old Testament Baal (a Canaanite idol). The hunk of gold certainly exists…but it has no content, no meaning. It’s vacuous. So is ‘death’. The word exists (e.g., in a dictionary) but it has no content…no meaning. We imagine that our minds shape our language. Nothing could be further… It is our language that shapes our minds. This is the origin of idolatry, and it is the origin of the concept of death. “Are you for real? I see dead people (like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense ); and dead birds (hopefully not Sparrows ) and dead cats and dead mosquitoes and…” Well, you get the picture. Of course! ‘Dead’ is an adjective. It describes an objective state of affairs; it demarcates the boundary between one state of affairs and another. ‘Death’ is something else again. Death is a process and an experience. It is subjective. But it is an experience that no one has ever had, ever will have, or ever could have. Death cannot be experienced because it is literally defined as the absence of experience. Life, at least conscious life, can only ever be one thing, ‘life’. Are you alive? Well, congratulations… or condolences, but either way, you’re stuck with it. When we think of life , we specifically think of various time-bound processes: eating, making, talking, etc. Philosophers talk of organisms as dissipative systems . But time itself, by its entropic nature, is finite; life is not. Conscious life is negentropic ; it is the suspension (or retardation) of finitude. So we have a paradox. Once alive, always alive, but not always alive in time. Life, at least conscious life , is not time bound. You’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. Where conscious life ends and organic chemistry begins is not on the menu today (although it is a most delicious dish in its own right). Today, I ask only that you agree with me that ‘conscious life’ exists, that it is a thing . Agreed? Ok then. Unlike the other processes (above) that we routinely associate with life, consciousness is not time-bound. In fact, it is the specific function of consciousness to resist time. Consider Heraclitus’ famous river. It cannot be alive, much less conscious, precisely because it flows . Change is continuous. Therefore, it cannot be conscious. Consciousness is a product of a variation in the flow rate…and rivers just flow. Sidebar : Heraclitus is the real nihilist. His famous ‘ panta rei ’ (Greek for ‘everything flows’) is equivalent to the Latin, ‘nihil est’. Panta rei equates being with flow, which is entropy, the annihilation of being. So being = not-being? This is the basis of an entire philosophy? But I digress. A river is not a thing-in-itself. It is an accident of geography, a gash in the surface of the earth. Its existence, its flow rate, its course – all accidents of nature. It does not resist time; it models time. “Oh time is like a river…nothing but a river.” (Grayson Hugh) That is not to say that the river isn’t teeming with life; it certainly is! Microscopic animals, unicellular plants, fish, and one big freshwater mammal, my flabby, bleached white, Uncle Ned. How about water nymphs? How about pre-biotic eddies from which life as we know it might evolve (and did evolve)? The river teems with life, at least some of it conscious (Ned?), but the river itself is not conscious, not conscious of itself or its world; it just flows. As Proust so brilliantly illustrated in his Remembrance of Things Past , consciousness is the suspension of time, whether in a fleeting moment of self-reflection or in a long lost memory retrieved from early childhood. Consciousness is not time-bound. Certainly, it is dependent on time-bound structures, e.g., a brain, for its origin, but once it occurs, there is no ‘sufficient reason’ for it to cease to be. Once thought, thought! So no, I am most certainly not a nihilist. I just don’t believe in ‘life after death’; I believe instead in life beyond life, i.e., consciousness. ***** Image: Two panels - the despairing "Hell," and "Ascent of the Blessed," featuring a journey through a tunnel towards a brilliant light - from a late 15th century painting by Hieronymus Bosch at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice. 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. 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< Back Thrown by Heidegger “Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.” David Cowles It’s September 4, 1947, and an amniotic ocean has just disgorged a living organism that I will eventually come to call “me.” Waves of time and space have thrown me, naked, choking, almost drowned, onto a desolate ‘beach’ (it’s not Maui). I am dazed and confused and utterly helpless. Immediately, I learn that I am not alone; there are other organisms on this ‘beach’ as well. At first, awareness of the others terrifies me, but very quickly I learn that, for the most part, these organisms mean me no harm. In fact, some of them actually seem to be taking care of me. Job One , obviously, is survival. Even a newborn baby knows that much! Apparently, for now at least, I must depend for that survival on the kindness of others . That said, I must make sure that those ‘others’ continue to care for me. I must do everything in my power to hold their attention and to strengthen our bond. In short, I must be cute. Survival strategy in place, it’s time for Job Two : achieving and maintaining a general sense of wellbeing. This requires an overarching sense of security (above) and the discovery of a lifestyle that more or less consistently delivers an acceptable ratio of pleasure to pain. I’m not yet six months old, but I’m already hard at work on Job Two. When adults say that a baby is learning to comfort itself, that’s me working on Job Two. With Job Two comes my first intuition that we are not just Skinner Boxes and that our world is governed neither by stimulus-response (physiology) nor by cause-and-effect (physics). There’s something more going on…but what? The alternating waves of pain and pleasure I’ve experienced since birth are perhaps not the final word, and as part of Job One, I’ve already learned some techniques for managing pain and enhancing pleasure. Job Two stimulates the first dim awareness of something beyond just survival and pleasure: other, less obvious threads, connecting events. To achieve a general sense of wellbeing, I must travel deep into the lair of the others . Time then for Job Three : “Get a job!” At 18 months of age? You bet. I already intuit that ‘cute’ is not going to get me through. If I am to survive long term, post-cute, I need to find a way to fit into others’ lives and enhance them. I want to rebuild my relationships on a more reciprocal foundation. This is the role of roles ! From birth, I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet (Eliot). #1 – ‘cute face’; but that only takes me so far. I quickly learn that I need different faces for different people and different contexts. Potentially, at least, I can be a unique someone for each someone I meet. But as I age arithmetically, my circle of interlocutors grows geometrically, and my database of social interactions grows exponentially. I can no longer afford to prepare a face de nuevo for every face I meet. “There will be time, there will be time”(Eliot) …until there isn’t. It’s a dilemma, a dilemma society resolves with something called roles . On paper, I am a unique person every time I interact with another. But IRL, many of these unique personae overlap, sometimes massively. They have elements in common. When that commonality reaches a certain level, a Gestalt occurs, and suddenly, I’m lumping those personae together into roles . A pile has become a heap; a stand of trees has become a forest. A role is a set of personae , generalized to cover a range of contexts and a myriad of interlocutors. It is the calcification of habit. Encouraged by our socio-economic system, the average person is playing a half-dozen different roles during any one time period. Here are a few of the overlapping roles I got to ‘try out’ as a child: Cute Baby Curious Toddler Performer on-Demand Friend Good Kid Playmate Student Junior Athlete As I’ve aged, I’ve added a host of new roles to my repertoire: Student Athlete Political Activist Seeker Employee Employer Customer Salesperson Spouse Parent Homme d’affaires Bon Vivant Grandparent Retiree Writer So yes, I need roles. Roles are levers; they allow me to manipulate the world, to navigate it. They are octagonal keys that fit perfectly into octagonal locks. Roles are massive data compressors; they allow me to convert a welter of raw experience into small, repeatable, and scalable snippets of code. Just as importantly, if I’m honest, my roles allow me brief and shallow respites from the sheer terror of being alive. They give me an instant sense of Identity and Belonging . I have a place now in that giant Calder mobile that is the world. I make a difference in that world; it would be different without me. I imagine it would be very different. Like Atlas, I have the weight of the world, quite literally, on my shoulders. I am one of the ‘charms’ that keeps the mobile du monde balanced. Whatever this is, we’re all in this together. Knowing I’m not alone gives me another unwarranted but still very welcome sense of relief. I have an identity at last; finally, I belong. I am no longer a piece of beach litter, crumpled up and thrown away thoughtlessly onto sand. I am ‘someone’, a tapestry woven from my roles! Yet, at the end of the day, when the bedroom is darkened and the ceiling looms lid-like above me, I know I am lying to myself…and you. I am not ‘Cute Baby’, I am not ‘Student Athlete’, I am not ‘Writer.’ Of course, I do baby-like, student-like, athlete-like, and writer-like things, but I am none of these personae. Dilemma : I am pretending to be someone (i.e. a nexus of roles)…and I seem to be getting away with it. My act is convincing. The others recognize me as one of their own, and as someone with something unique to contribute. Accordingly, life is a little less terrifying now; in fact, it is sometimes even fun . So take the win! The flip side of security is complacency. The ‘win’ is bad faith . By taking it, I officially give up my quest to figure out ‘what the hell’s going on here’; but if I reject it, I am doomed to live out my life alone, as an ontological exile. Well, the choice is easy, isn’t it? “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; am an attendant lord, one who will do well to swell a progress…” (Eliot) I have to get by after all – pay the mortgage, pick up the kids from school, take the family to the Isle of Wight for a summer holiday. I don’t have time for nonsense. I’m ok being Atlas, holding up the world, but not Jesus, saving the world; I’m too frightened. But for a tortured few, the trade-off itself, the bad faith , is more than they can bear. I’m thinking Socrates, Nietzsche, and of course, Jesus himself…but not me. I put on my roles each day as a police officer puts on her uniform. We both know that we are not what our uniforms denote. But wearing those uniforms sure helps us get through our day. Plus, if an identity isn’t working for me, no problem, I’ll just try on another one instead! I can keep trying on uniforms until I get it right. The process is what society calls, “Finding yourself.” The trouble is, it never comes right. It’s not that you’re not this role or that role, it is that you aren’t any role; you are not a role at all! Oh, life would be a heck of a lot easier if we could just be the people that we’re pretending to be. Imagine that! We are like human babies raised by wolves. We don’t fully realize that we are not in fact wolves. It’s going to be a rude awakening when we find out…if we ever do. Caveat Lector : If you prefer to think of yourself as a full-fledged member of the wolf pack, then stop reading this article now…and thanks for visiting. For the rest of you, personae and roles are props we adopt to help us get through life. Unfortunately, most of us come to believe that we are those props. My mask becomes my face. Even so, the reward for believing is just too great to pass up: ‘a temporary but pervasive sense of wellbeing’! Sound familiar? Perhaps it is Identity that is the opiate of masses. But again, I take the win! I trade truth for peace. I’m pretending to be some pretty interesting people, after all. If only I could actually be one of them! But I know I can’t. All the booze, drugs, and sex in the world can’t make me forget for more than a few minutes at a time that I am not any of the people I pretend to be. Philosophers say that the purpose of life is personal happiness . I sure hope they’re wrong because I can never be ‘happy’! Not that I’m unhappy; I’m certainly not miserable. These ‘states of mind’ just aren’t in my repertoire. They’re not ontologically compatible with who I am. My avatars are happy, or not, but not me. I feel my avatar being happy, but I quickly catch myself. I remember that I am not the one who is happy. I realize that I am watching the equivalent of a ‘movie’ of myself being happy. Speaking of movies, I’m watching Gone with the Wind . I’m heavily invested in the characters. I let myself feel their joy and their pain. Then I recall that nothing’s actually happening…except me eating popcorn. I am watching images ‘painted’ on celluloid and then projected onto a giant screen in front of me. The images are of Civil War Tara . The story is drawn from history but the characters, the plot and the dialog are 100% invented by the author, Margaret Mitchell, who knew neither the Civil War nor me. Nothing that’s happening on the screen has anything to do with me or with anyone who lived during the War for that matter. The relationship we have with characters from fiction is very similar to the relationship we have with our avatars, ‘characters from our own fiction.’ We yearn to belong to a larger social group: family, community, country, congregation, union, pub team, Man U fan club, etc., and avatars get us in the door. They are like the fake ID I had in college. And we covet specific identities within those groups – not so much personally chosen identities, rather sub-roles we can comfortably step into to support in an identifiable way the overall ‘mission’ of the group. If I cannot invent my own identity, I am not above going with a store bought costume. Bottom line : everybody wants you to know their name! ( Cheers ) Nobody wants to be anonymous. When you call me by name, you testify to the fact that I have an identity and that I belong in this world. What a (superficial) relief! But of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere. My mother said it best, “Be somebody!” Worst advice she ever gave me! Sorry, Mom, somebody is precisely what I can never be. In the idiom of Jean-Paul Sartre, I am not who I am, and I am who I am not. This sense of disjunction accompanies every experience we have. You are none of the people you’re trying to be. You’ll never be a wolf, no matter how much you wish you were. You’ll never be your parents’ child, you’ll never be your spouse’s spouse, you’ll never be your children’s parent. I am sitting in a Paris café, sipping Beaujolais Nouveau, watching the world pass by. What could be better? Surely, now I am happy. Well, in fact, no! Not that wine sipping isn’t good; it is. It’s just that I am not that café-sitting wine sipper; I am watching that café-sitter and I wish him well, but he’s not me. I am not sipping wine; I am watching myself sip wine. I am experiencing the wine-sipping through the prism of my thoughts: “How marvelous to be sipping wine in Paris! I must introduce X to this experience. If only it was a little less breezy! I wonder how this year’s vintage compares with last. I must make plans to come again next year at this same time. I wonder if they’ll come a time when I can’t come to Paris anymore. If only the waiter hadn’t put a pea underneath my seat cushion.” I don’t know who I am, but I do know I am not the one sipping wine, but I can’t let on. Sharing my angst would be like donning a dunce cap…or worse, like being an artist. Now I’ve discovered my ‘role of roles’, my uber-role : it’s reinforcing the roles of others. “Isn’t this marvelous?” I offer the table next to me, as I shoot a selfie to a few friends back in the States. Everybody needs to know, “This is a good as it gets!” And it is…for café-sitting wine-sippers. Imagine yourself at a table next to mine. You hear me singing the praises of Paris wine sipping. Of course, you’re having your own disjunctive experience which you dare not own up to. Hearing me only alienates you further from your actuality. “What’s wrong with me,” you think, “that I cannot enjoy this experience the way the guy next to me is experiencing it?” (Pretending to experience it, that is.) We are all part of a global enterprise to build the World Wide Wrinkle , a membrane that separates all of us from ourselves, a distortion on the edge of Being that prevents us from ever seeing what’s below the surface. No matter what experiences the universe cooks up for me, I won’t experience any of them directly. I will experience myself watching myself having those experiences. My avatar experiences; I watch! I’m not unhappy; it’s just that I’m not the sort of thing that can be happy. I’m not the sort of thing that has experiences. I am the sort of thing that watches someone (myself?) having experiences. I am not a noun; I am not a verb (apologies to Buckminster Fuller). Syntactically, I am some sort of ‘reflexive particle’, an indicator that the proposition in question is recursive. But in truth, I am not any ‘part of speech’; I am the phenomenon of recursion itself. “It recurs; therefore, I am.” Unfortunately, it took me decades to discover this. 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 Summer 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? < Back The People's Creed David Cowles Jul 12, 2022 But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? You’ve probably heard of the Nicene Creed, maybe even the Apostles’ Creed. You’re less likely to be familiar with the Athanasian Creed. But did you know that a 6th century Irish poet developed his own version of a ‘creed’…which I have named, the People’s Creed? Philosophy has traditionally distinguished between the ‘essence’ of things (what is) and the ‘existence’ of things (that is). ‘Essence’ normally refers to the qualities, attributes, and values that characterize a particular event (or ‘actual entity’), while ‘existence’ is usually thought to be ‘value free:’ Is just is! (Bill Clinton notwithstanding). Right off the bat, this raises a few eyebrows. Can there be an ‘it is’ without a ‘what is?’ Or a ‘what is’ without an ‘it is?’ Can there be essence without existence or existence without essence? From Augustine to Aquinas to Leo XIII and beyond, it has been a bedrock principle of Christianity that Essence and Existence cannot be logically isolated from one another. Anselm of Bec (c. 1077), for example, attempted to use the relationship between essence and existence to prove the existence of God. Called his ‘ontological proof,’ Anselm defined God as the supreme Good (essence). His task: to prove that the supreme Good (i.e., God) exists! Anselm reasoned that existence is ‘better’ than non-existence (so existence is not value free after all). Therefore, for an entity to be supremely Good, it must exist. An entity, in all ways supremely good but lacking existence, is not supremely good because being and good are aspects of each other. According to Parmenides of Elea, the Father of Western Philosophy, whatever lacks something, lacks everything. (“On Nature,” Fragment 8) Good, without Being, lacks something. It lacks existence! And lacking existence, it lacks everything else (all qualities) as well, per Parmenides. Values (20th British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, called them ‘eternal objects’) are vacuous until and unless they enter into the constitution of an ‘actual entity.’ ‘Being’ and ‘Good’ are synonyms and both are synonymous with ‘God’ (God is the source of both, and in fact, is both ). In his great ontological poem, “On Nature,” Parmenides (above) spoke of two modes of being: Aletheia (the mode of truth) and Doxa (the mode of appearance). Aletheia is featureless: “…ungenerated and imperishable…all together, one, continuous.” In the realm of Doxa , on the other hand, things “come to be and perish…shift place and…exchange bright color.” One way (and just one way) to read this foundational work of Western philosophy is to understand Aletheia as the existence of things and Doxa as their essence . A half century later, Plato talked of ‘universals’ (variously translated as ‘forms,’ ‘ideas,’ or ‘ideals’) and ‘particulars’ (concrete objects and events that reflect those ‘forms’). Later philosophers talked of substances (existence) and accidents (essence). Immanuel Kant wrote of noumena and phenomena. Philosophers from the Idealist and Empiricist schools championed essence at the expense of existence. At one point in his career, Bertrand Russell held that the world consisted only of “universals” (qualities) and that so-called objects and events were merely intersections of those universals. Russell translated the insights of the Impressionist painters into philosophy. Think Monet. Existentialism tried to restore balance. Think Cezanne. Martin Heidegger distinguished Wassein (‘what it is’) from Dasein (‘that it is’). Jean-Paul Sartre made use of the essence/existence dichotomy to define God as the being whose essence precedes his existence and Man (sic) as the being whose existence precedes his essence. God knows ‘what he is’ before (logically precedent, not temporally precedent) he knows ‘that he is.’ His essence precedes his existence, He is what he is because what he is (e.g., good) is what it means to be God. Human beings, on the other hand, know that they are (‘Cogito ergo sum’), long before they have any idea who or what they are. No set of qualities can define what it is to be a human being. To be human is to transcend ‘mere qualities.’ With Jean-Paul Sartre, the most we can say is, “I am not what I am, and I am what I am not.” Now, Deconstruction ( aka , ‘The Case of the Disappearing Subject’) has brought us back full circle to Russell’s ‘universalist’ argument. According to the Book of Job, and my own experience, most human beings die without ever finding knowledge (i.e., without ever learning who they are). They die knowing that they were but never really knowing who they were. (Job 4:21) “ Resolved : Anything that exists is better than anything that does not exist.” Let’s see how our high school debate team handles this one! According to Anselm, existence is one quality among others. Essence is fundamental and it entails Existence. A 6th century Irish hymn, traditionally (but doubtfully) attributed to Saint Dallan, makes a similar argument but from the opposite perspective, the perspective of existence . Existence is fundamental and it entails Essence. Dallan argues that only the existence of God matters since everything of value (essence) flows automatically from God and God alone. Good is God’s nature. Good is the way God participates in the world, and God is the way Good participates. Without Good, there is no real God; without God there is no real Good. Good and God might survive as abstract ‘concepts’ (John Lennon) but neither can participate in any actual world without the other. Concerning God, Anselm wrote: “…You are wisdom, you are truth, you are goodness, you are eternity, and you are every true good.” And later, “Therefore, you alone, Lord, are what you are… ” You alone, Lord, are what you are! Powerful words. But what about you and me? Are we what we are? Just the opposite! According to J-P Sartre (above), we are not what we are, and we are what we are not . Ok, we’ve taken care of you and me and, oh yeah, God, but what about the chair in the middle of my bedroom? Where does it fit in? From the perspective of the world, it is a tool (if I want to sit down) or an obstacle (if I’m walking around in the dark). Being a ‘chair’ is being a tool/obstacle (opposite sides of the same coin). Like God, a chair is its essence. But is it God? Can I decorate it and worship it, elevate it and pray to it? Well, I could, but first amendment or not, I wouldn’t expect to remain unconfined for very long! Two reasons: (1) the chair consists of its own particular qualities (size, firmness, craftsmanship, etc.) but it does not embody any of the other qualities that make up the universe. Like an old Model-T Ford, you can get it in any color you want…as long as it’s black. (2) ‘Chair’ per se does not exist! It’s all hat, no cattle. If the chair does not exist, then what’s that dark space in the middle of my room? Roughly speaking, it’s a jumble of molecules, and each molecule is a jumble of atoms, and each atom is a jumble of subatomic particles, and each subatomic particle is a jumble of quarks. Then what’s a quark? Well, it’s either the ‘sound’ of a one-dimensional string vibrating or it’s an element in the constitution of a subatomic particle. So, take your pick: an idol with a very limited number of qualities and no existence, or a God that includes all qualities and exists through those qualities in the world. St. Dallan, on the other hand, begins his poem: “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart, naught is all else to me save that Thou art . Thou my best thought by day and by night, Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.” Dallan’s poem, now a hymn but originally written in the form of a prayer, is also an ontology, a Creed . Sometimes called “Be Thou my Vision,” it is found in The Poem Book of the Gael , a treasure trove of early Irish verse. “Be Thou my Wisdom , Thou my true Word ; I ever with Thee, Thou with me, Lord. Thou my great Father, I thy dear son; Thou in me dwelling, I with Thee one… Be Thou my dignity , Thou my delight . Thou my soul’s shelter …” St. Dallan’s existentialism challenges duelist and essentialist ontologies head-on. Notice that every word Dallan uses to ‘describe’ God is a noun, not an adjective. In God, qualities are nouns. God is not only ‘just;’ God is Justice itself, etc. Only God is what he is! Our ‘accidents’ (qualities) are his ‘substance’ and his ‘substance’ (values) is our ‘accidents’. Superficially, essences, qualities, and accidents do not matter to this poet; all that matters is Existence, specifically the existence of God. That trust can only be attributed to his great faith. “Seek first the Kingdom of God…and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Mt 6: 33) I am immediately reminded of Job’s famous profession of faith: “I know that my vindicator lives and that on the last day he will testify on earth… Something I myself will view, what my eyes, not a stranger’s, will see.” (Job 19: 25-27) St. Dallan variously refers to God as “my Vision…my Wisdom…my dignity…my delight…(my) shelter.” He does not thank God for these graces, as others would because he knows that these qualities are God himself. God cannot cease being God! God is what he is! We can praise God, we can celebrate the fact that God participates in our world, but we cannot change God’s nature. God is good – live with it! Crudely stated, if God exists, Goodness is ours by virtue of God’s nature, but if God does not exist…then who cares? No God = no Goodness, Beauty, Truth, or Justice. Without God, whatever is, is, and that’s an end to it. Nothing is better - more beautiful, truthful, or just – than anything else. It is as meaningless to say, “Better days are coming,” as it is to say, “My best days are behind me.” There is no objective difference between shooting up a classroom full of 4th graders and volunteering at the school to tutor those same students. It’s just a matter of ‘personal taste.’ No judgment! The Old Testament Book of Judges repeats its famous ‘signature verse:’ “In those days, Israel had no king; every man (sic) did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 26: 25) Without God, we would need to rewrite Judges to read, “…every man did whatever he felt like doing.” Hmm, does this sound at all familiar? “If it feels good, do it.” (compliments of the years 1965 -1975) For Dallan, God is Vision, Wisdom and Dignity, per se , and specifically Dallan’s vision, wisdom and dignity, and ours too, of course! Anselm wrote regarding God: “Therefore, you are the very life by which you live, the wisdom by which you are wise, and the very goodness by which you are good to the good and to the wicked…” Good is God’s nature. He cannot but be good. Therefore, God is ‘no respecter of persons,’ be they good…or not so good. You bring good, God brings good; you bring not-good; God still brings good! I am reminded of a five-year-old boy playing ‘rock, scissors, paper’ with his Dad. After a few rounds, the boy volunteered, “I always choose rock.” Not exactly a winning strategy on the boy’s part…and yet, the boy is in good company. It is God’s strategy too ,“If I throw rock every time for long enough, maybe you’ll eventually thrown scissors, either out of your own boredom, to see what will happen, or out of your compassion for me.” You can keep throwing paper and, congratulations, you win…every time. But it’s a hollow victory indeed. God lets you win – boring and a bit humiliating - but hey, you won the toy (prize) didn’t you? Isn’t life all about who has the most toys? God always picks ‘rock,’ i.e., Goodness. He can’t help himself. He is good to those who are good, but he is just as good to those who are not so good. And like this five-year-old, he let us know early on that he was going to be his strategy. Surprisingly, this makes a lot of people mad…very mad…mad at God! They think that they deserve to be rewarded by God for their so-called goodness, and a major part of that reward should be to see others punished for their wickedness. Imagine this: you are Beauty, Truth, and Justice and yet people are mad at you! You can’t win for losin’ in the God-game – at least not if you’re God. We are like pre-teen children, we live to see our siblings punished, the more severely the better, even for the most minor transgressions. Of course, when we ourselves ‘run afoul of the law,’ we tend to be much more lenient. Suddenly, we hear a lot about the ‘forgiveness’ and ‘second chance’ that we deserve because we are ‘normally so good’… forgiveness and a second chance for us, but not for our ‘rotten brothers and sisters.’ We exist because we participate in God, who is Being. We are who we are because God, who is Good, participates in us. It is our response , freely given, to God’s Goodness that constitutes who we are. God is supremely good by nature; I am not! But I do have the capacity to be good, to make the right choices, and that capacity I derive directly from God. This is not just ‘any god.’ This is an explicitly Trinitarian God. In my relatedness (Vision), I recapitulate the Son ( logos ); in my consciousness (Wisdom), I recapitulate the Spirit; and in my identity (Dignity), I recapitulate the Father. Our lives are a direct participation in the life of the Trinity. Later in Dallan’s poem, we read that God is “power of my power” and “heart of my own heart.” God’s existence is the sole source of our ability to act upon the world (power) and to be acted upon by the world (heart). In grammar, we call these two modalities of being (power and heart) the ‘active voice’ and the ‘passive voice:’ we act, we are acted upon. But our relationship with God is neither active nor passive; it is perfectly reciprocal: “I ever with Thee, Thou with me, Lord…Thou in me dwelling, I with Thee one.” Consider the Eucharist: we incorporate the body of Christ at Communion, and by that very act we are simultaneously incorporated into Christ’s body. How can we describe this kind of relationship? It turns out that in many ancient languages (e.g., Greek, Old Norse) verbs had a third voice in addition to the active and passive voices. This third voice is usually referred to as the “middle voice” because, ostensibly, it falls ‘between active and passive.’ In reality, it transcends both. The middle voice is the voice of love, the voice of prayer, and the only voice we should ever use when speaking with God or about God…if only we still had a middle voice in our modern Indo-European languages. But back to Dallan’s text: “Thou mine inheritance”. Do I inherit God, or does God inherit me? I am reminded of Alice’s closing line in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Lookingglass : “Was the Red Knight part of my dream, or was I part of the Red Knight’s dream.” Thinking in the middle voice, our answer to Alice should be, “Both!” I inherit God, and, therefore, God dwells in me (“Thou in me dwelling”); God inherits me, and, therefore, I dwell in God (“I with Thee one”). It is the perfect middle-voice paradigm. Just as the spatiotemporal world is a projection of the eternal, so the eternal world is a roll-up of the spatiotemporal: “So that God may be all in all” ( I Cor. 15: 20 – 28). I interact with the world on the spatiotemporal plane (power and heart, active and passive voices), but I interact with God on the plane of eternity. According to Thomas Aquinas: “God alone is Good essentially…whatever belongs to others accidentally, belongs to Him essentially…Everything is called good by reason of the likeness of divine goodness belonging to it…Everything seeks its own perfection…(and) all things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself.” God is Good, essentially, and it is the Good that is God that constitutes the raison d’etre for all other beings. Existence is the process of seeking perfection. Paraphrasing an ad for the US Army: “Being is the process of being all that you can be.” The urge to exist is the urge to be Good, to be like God, even to become one with God. But while all existents inherit God’s qualities, we are unconditionally free to appropriate those qualities in any way we wish. We may even reject them entirely if we choose to do so, or we may ‘modify them’ to achieve what we believe, mistakenly, is a ‘better end’ than God intended. We do know everything after all! Yet spatiotemporal relations constitute only one dimension of my being; I am also in an eternal relationship with God. God is existence! Therefore, whatever exists must participate in God. Whatever we transact with the world, we are simultaneously transacting with God. From Plato on, mainstream philosophy has struggled to reconcile essence and existence. Numerous extremely clever solutions have been proposed to account for both without slipping into dualism. But St. Dallan’s Creed asserts that this reasoning is for ‘naught.’ There is no conflict to be explained away, there is no dichotomy to be resolved. God’s essence conceptually precedes his existence, but at the same time, his existence physically entails his essence. It is a ‘virtuous cycle.’ So, St. Dallan’s ‘simple’ Irish poem is much more than a poem or a hymn or even a prayer; it is a creed! It defines and accounts for the key elements of Christian ontology: Creation, Incarnation and Salvation, and it does so in the context of a Trinitarian God. St. Dallan’s creed stands next to the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed and the Athanasian Creed; it is the “People’s Creed.” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Share Previous Next 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 Bakunin Nailed It “Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.” David Cowles It’s Sunday night and I’m doing what every boy does on a Sunday night: I’m reading 19th century philosophy; tonight, it’s Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876). Bakunin is not ordinarily grouped with the ‘Metaphysical GOATs’ (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel). At best he is relegated to the 2nd tier, the cloud of social philosophers. In fact, however, Bakunin can be thought of as the St. Paul of Anarchism. He didn’t invent anarchism, but he systematized it and popularized it as an alternative to the sterile socialism of Mark and Engels. But even this is to sell Bakunin short. Turns out, he was a Metaphysician - First Class after all. For example, he wrote: • “Man is able to project himself in his thought, examining and observing himself like a strange eternal object.” Check : This is precisely what Nietzsche said could not be done. • “By lifting himself in thought above himself, and above the material world around him, he reaches the representation of perfect abstraction, the absolute void.” Check : This is Kierkegaard’s Abyss . This is what John saw when he broke the seventh seal. • “And this absolute (void) is nothing less than his capacity for (perfect) abstraction, which disdains all that exists and finds its repose in attaining complete negation. This is the ultimate limit of the highest abstraction of mind; this absolute nothingness is God.” Check : “I am not what I am and I am what I am not.” ( Sartre ) Nailed it! Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right. How so? We find ourselves ‘thrown’ (Heidegger) onto the ‘beach of being’, ignorant, defenseless, thoroughly lost. Our one goal is to survive! Survive now ( praxis )… and develop a strategy to survive long term ( gnosis ). We are surrounded by entities other than ourselves. We quickly see that our survival depends on understanding these entities, and ultimately, on influencing them. Viewing those entities through the prism of Indo-European language, we label them things (nouns) or events ( verbs ). ‘Things’ and ‘events’ are somewhat imprecise labels we affix to phenomena . We classify a phenomenon as a ‘thing’ or as an ‘event’ depending on whether we wish to call attention to its endurance (Parmenides’ Truth) or its transience (Heraclitus’ Flux): “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide.” We are like the away team on a future starship, dispatched to the surface of exoplanet XS325W to map its terrain – except, we are not mapping an exoplanet; we are mapping Being itself. Life is like a game of Battleship . It begins with a completely unconditioned ‘guess’. We note the results, and we add their coordinates to our emerging world map . This is my one and only random move. Every future move will be ‘informed’ by the results of all the moves that came before it. Gradually, we move from absolute ignorance to something approaching certain knowledge. As we push the buttons and pull the levers that constitute ‘the world’, we are simultaneously mapping the terrain. We call this ‘science’. I’m hungry, I cry, I get fed. Now I associate crying with satiety, and I hypothesize a causal relationship between the two: post hoc ergo propter hoc . For the rest of my life, I will test and refine this hypothesis and look to extend it to other ordered pairs (of data) I uncover along the way. Needs multiply: feed me, change me, sooth me. My gestures (crying) modulate. Crying works for this but not for that . A certain ‘style of crying’ seems better correlated with a certain result. My map of the world is gaining definition. As I get older, my crying becomes more nuanced and less obvious, but make no mistake about it, I’m still crying, right up to the very end. Ah, the gift of life! Our survival is at stake from the moment of our birth (or conception). My first awareness is an awareness of discomfort, if not pain. In the language of the existentialists, we are the being whose being is always in doubt. Our being is inseparable from our mortality. I resort to a series of random gestures in hopes that something will make this pain go away; et voilà, something does! Or does it? Have I discovered causality (Laplace)…or coincidence (Hume)? I will need to test my proposed correlation until I am so sure of the causal link that I am willing to ‘bet my life on it’. Once satisfied, I can fill in my map with its first data point, an ordered pair (X = my behavior; Y = my comfort). Over the next 30,000 days or so, I’ll discover, test, and map many more such correlations. Primal awareness is strangely complex: I am aware of phenomena that I classify as ‘self’ and I am aware of phenomena that I classify as ‘not self’. From my perspective, this is the primal distinction (not darkness and light as in Genesis ); but by itself, it does not even come close to capturing the experience of being human. What’s missing? Me! I’m missing from this model. I am aware of the phenomena, ‘self’ and ‘not-self’, precisely because I am neither . If I were ‘self’, then there would be no need, or even function, for ‘not-self’. ‘Self’ would form a self-contained universe, and we could have no knowledge (or need) of anything outside it. If ‘I’ am an element of ‘self’, then I am perfectly redundant and therefore my very existence is a violation of Occam’s Razor: I am de trop . On the other hand, it is hard to ignore the intuition that there is something fundamentally different between observing and being observed. Objects are observed; subjects observe. Granting for the moment that there is nothing more to conscious awareness than the operation of a network of neurons and excluding the possible existence of some mysterious, spiritual anti substance, it is still difficult not to notice the difference between a subject’s awareness of an event and the objective event itself. “They’re not even the same sort of thing.” A world ‘with me’ and a world ‘without me’ would be exactly the same world; but ‘to be’ is not to be the same but to be different, novel, unique, to matter, to have consequences, to leave footprints in the sand. According to Gregory Bateson and Alfred North Whitehead, ‘to be’ is to be different and to make a difference. Were ‘I’ to be merely an element of ‘self’, I would not matter, I would make no difference, my being would have no consequences, and the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life , could have never been made. Quelle domage! Even so, I think it is safe to say that a majority of contemporary philosophers, scientists, etc. believe we live in just such a world – a world in which ‘I’ is an element of ‘self’. I say ‘believe’ because for many reductionists, mechanists, positivists and naïve realists, the proposition ‘I ɛ S’ is a matter of deep, almost religious, conviction: “It is this way because it has to be this way , even if it’s not!” We cling to our ‘enlightened’ secular model even though it predicts a universe that is frozen, lifeless, devoid of all novelty, a world in which Achilles loses a road race to a tortoise – in other words, a universe that has virtually nothing in common with our world. The human experience is dialectic: I am aware of ‘self’ ( thesis ), I am aware of ‘not-self’ ( antithesis) and I am aware of ‘being aware’ of self and not-self ( synthesis ). Neti, neti (Sanskrit): not this, not that, the keyword being ‘not’. I am by being-not and being-not is a form of abstraction. When I am ‘not this ball’, I am abstracting from the ball its location, momentum, and sensory appearance. ‘To be’ I must have something ‘not to be’. I cannot not-be ‘ball’ per se because ‘ball’ is a noumenon, a Platonic Idea, not a phenomenon. According to Kant, I ‘kan’t know’ a noumenon; I can only know its phenomenal aspect. Therefore, I cannot not be or not be ‘ball’ per se ; I can only ‘not be’ the ball’s various characteristics. To abstract is to de-concretize , and so “perfect abstraction” would result in an “absolute void”. I am the relentless spirit of restlessness at the heart of Being. As such, I “disdain all that exists”. I ‘negate it’ and it is only in such negation that I find any measure of “repose”. (Bakunin) “Eternal rest ( gnosis ) grant unto them, O Lord, and may the perpetual light shine upon them.” Rest in peace is not a final farewell. It is a battle cry: “Be Human!” David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Previous Next

< Back Quark Soup David Cowles “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Do you like riddles? Try this one: “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Give up? I’m Quark Soup! But what the heck is that? All the objects in our world are made of atoms. Each atom consists of a nucleus and a bunch of electrons (ok, at least one electron) surrounding that nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is made of protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons are made up of quarks: three quarks each to be exact. Quarks stick together…but not necessarily by choice. They are held together by a very strong kind of superglue called a gluon (glue-on, get it?). But gluons work differently from any glue you’ve ever used. When the quarks are just hanging out peacefully inside a proton or neutron, the gluons don’t do much; however, if one quark tries to break loose from the others, the gluons swing into action. They tug tightly on that quark so it can’t escape. The more the quark tries to pull away, the tighter the gluon tugs on it. Gluons are so strong that there is no way for a quark to escape from a proton or neutron…unless you heat it up to four trillion degrees (4,000,000,000,000º C). Only at that temperature (sometimes written 4 x 10¹², meaning 4 with 12 zeros after it) can quarks break gluons’ grip to form Quark Soup. So, where can I go to sample this rare gastronomic treat? You’d need to rent a time machine, but if you point your time machine at the center of the universe as it was 13 billion years ago, you’ll find yourself, quite literally, ‘in the soup.’ You’ll have to calibrate your time machine very, very accurately, though. Your target is a fraction of a second, 13 billion years ago. If you want Quark Soup, you’ve got to ‘stick’ the landing. Ok, that sounds annoying! How about I travel to the center of the sun instead? I hear there are some fabulous restaurants there, but no, sorry, you’re out of luck there too: the center of the sun is a mere 40,000,000º C – we’re still five zeros short. You have a better chance of getting a frozen popsicle on the sun than you have of getting Quark Soup. Let’s recap : You’re craving Quark Soup, but there’s literally nowhere in the universe you can go to get it, at least not now! You can either travel back 13 billion years…or you can make it yourself! The recipe is super easy, and the ingredients are relatively cheap, though the ‘pots and pans’ you’ll need for this recipe could be a bit pricey. Recipe : The nuclei of two gold atoms, two miles of tubing and some very powerful magnets. Insert the nuclei into the tube and use the magnets to accelerate the nuclei through that tube. When you get the nuclei up to a speed almost equal to the speed of light, use the magnets to make them crash into one another, head-on. Bang, you’ve got the temperature you need for Quark Soup! Once upon a time, but only for a fraction of a second, the whole universe was Quark Soup. Long before the end of that first second, the soup disappeared and has never since existed anywhere in the universe…except once on Long Island (NY); of course, where else? In 2010, at a place called Brookhaven, scientists finally freed quarks from their 13 billion year bondage! They built something called a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC for short) – this is the costly part. They followed the recipe (above) exactly (using 1,740 powerful magnets) and guess what? It worked! They ‘created’ Quark Soup on Long Island. So, if you can’t get enough time off from work or school to go back to the center of the universe 13 billion years ago, perhaps you could make it to Long Island, a dozen or so years ago. Even so, this seems like a lot of trouble to go through for a drop of soup: what’s this soup like, anyway? What makes it soooo special? Well, for one thing, it’s hot, very, very hot, 4 x 10¹²º C hot, but it’s still a liquid: ‘ Quark Soup don’t boil!’ And what a liquid! It pours at least 20 times more easily than ordinary tap water, but it it is also very, very thick (i.e., dense). Good thing because it’s also very, very small. How small is it? Think of a box (cube) where each edge is about an inch long. Is that how small it is? Not exactly. Now split that box up into 10 smaller boxes. Is that how small it is? Are we there yet? Then, split one of those smaller boxes into 10 even smaller boxes, and keep doing this until you’ve done it a total of 12 times. That’s how small it is and, yes, we’re there now! Talk about small portions! Of course, you could order a sandwich with your soup, but no need. A drop of Quark Soup weighs about 1,000 pounds. Oops, hold that sandwich and bring me a doggie-bag instead. Turns out, Quark Soup is heavier (the correct scientific term is “denser”) than anything else in the universe…except a black hole. So, Quark Soup is hot, slippery, and thick, but what does it taste like? Is it worth all the fuss? Who knows? No one’s ever tasted it. There were no people around 13 billion years ago to sample this concoction, and time travel has not been perfected yet. What about Long Island? The scientists at Brookhaven were watching their weight. A 1,000 pound drop of soup was the last thing they needed! However, there’s another problem: a single drop would vaporize your whole body – a heavy price to pay for a sip, however delicious it may be. So, there’s no way to know what Quark Soup tastes like, unless, of course, you ask Bobby Flay. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Grace Krzenski Young Writer Winner, Winter 2023 Grace Krzenski is a junior at Cabrini High School, New Orleans, where she enjoys studying science and English. Grace is on the varsity Cabrini basketball team, and in her spare time enjoys reading, playing basketball, and spending time with family and friends. She is looking forward to attending college somewhere in the southern states to study marine biology. Integrity vs. Life

< Back Christian Anarchism ”A heretical state is not a bad state…A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states. There are only states and pseudo-states.” David Cowles (The recent success of right-of-center, neo-Anarchist political movements around the world gives new urgency to this topic.) Christian Anarchism , an oxymoron if ever there was one, right? After all, Christianity is all about order – the order of the world that God created ( Genesis ). The Logos (ordering principle) through whom God creates the things of the world and redeems them. The hierarchy of the Church. The Decalogue and the rest of the 613 mandates of Torah . A second-grade classroom in a 1950’s parochial school with fifty pupils, one teacher, and ‘pin drop’ silence. That’s order; that’s Christianity! Right? So then, what’s with this so-called Christian Anarchism ? Obviously, anarchy has no place in ‘a Christian universe’… if you understand ‘anarchy’ as synonymous with chaos, disorder or even entropy itself. On the other hand, if you understand ‘anarchy’ as the lack of an externally imposed order (society’s exoskeleton), the situation gets a bit murkier. The lack of an externally imposed order does not preclude the spontaneous emergence of order (an endoskeleton); in fact, it requires it! Max Entropy is incompatible with Being itself. After all, God once and for all put an end to disorder at the moment of creation ( Genesis 1: 1-2). “The light shone in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” ( John 1: 5) Mikhail Bakunin, the ‘St. Paul of Anarchists’, underscored this point: “Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker…Each directs and is directed in his (sic) turn, therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and above all, voluntary authority, and subordination. ” ( God and State ) What of Torah , God’s law? Clearly, it is imposed on humanity, indeed on the universe, by a transcendent entity…right? Absolutely…and yet not so much! Torah is God’s law, but it emerges both from the will of God and from the human heart: ‘as above so below’ (the Star of David), ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Jewish tradition speaks of two Torahs – the Written Torah ( aka the Pentateuch ) and the Oral Torah, embedded in the laws of nature and in our hearts. The absolute genius of Judaism is contained in the ‘=’ sign it places between the two. God is Justice; man (sic) is just, at least potentially. There would be no such thing as a ‘just act’ in the absence of Divine Justice; but also, it is by ‘just acts’ that transcendent Divine Justice becomes immanent in the world of events. Perhaps then we should not be surprised after all to find the rudiments of Anarchism embedded in the Social Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. How so? After “render unto Caesar” there wouldn’t seem to have been much wiggle room. Plus, Thomas Aquinas himself affirmed that all are required to follow the validly enacted laws of their respective societies, regardless of the preferred political process du jour ; but Thomas added a crucial qualifier: Laws are valid only if they do not conflict with the will of God, which is Justice. Sidebar #1 : This is not theocracy per se . God is not a legislator, a politician, or a spin-doctor. Satan offered to place his entire global network at Jesus’s disposal…but Jesus declined. In fact, he did a full Sherman : “If nominated, I will not run; if elected I will not serve.” Was Jesus waiting for a better offer? From Raymond Reddington perhaps? God is Justice! Any validly enacted law is binding…but only so long as and to the extent that it is just! God does not dictate the color of traffic lights (red, yellow, green, et al.). Yet it makes sense to think that in general laws that promote traffic safety are consistent with God’s will. When Leo XIII became Pope (1878), he faced a crisis of social disintegration. Society seemed hopelessly divided by class, by nation, and by ideology. Karl Marx had thrown down the gauntlet 30 years earlier when he wrote: “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.” It was high time the Church responded…and, as we shall soon see, it did just that! Christian tradition supports the legitimacy of the State, but as defined by Samuel and David, not by Hitler and Stalin. The State as it occurs in history is not necessarily the state envisioned in Christian sociology. In our epoch, for instance, the very concept of State entails the subjugation of the individual to the collective. But this ‘collective’ does not develop organically out of freely formed interpersonal relations, a la Rousseau . Rather, it is an anti-logos imposed on all social interaction by a limited segment of the body politic. In contemporary political theory, the nation state is the ultimate sovereign entity (Hegel). It confers limited, subsidiary sovereignty on smaller political and social units, it recognizes (at its sole discretion) certain human and civil rights, it preserves certain ‘useful’ institutions (e.g., family, church), but it reserves the right to regulate the behavior of all individuals and groups according to its conception of the ‘general welfare’. The rather vague notion of ‘general welfare’ is given further structure by the Utilitarian meme: Greatest Good for the Greatest Number . That’s easy to measure, right? No problems there; and it works…provided you accept Edmund Lear’s axiom: “A collection of undefined terms, thrown together, can function as an objective metric.” According to such a ‘value system’, colonialism and imperialism are not only justified but mandated. War, slavery, and all manner of human exploitation can be ‘overlooked’ so long as it serves the State’s notion of ‘the greater good’. One person’s slavery may be justified if it provides others with exaggerated advantage. Does any of this sound familiar? It should. We are mid-way though Machiavelli’s 1000-year Reich. Machiavelli represents a pivot point in the Intellectual History of Europe. Like a funnel with two mouths and one neck, Machiavellianism inputs the wisdom of Ancient Greece and Medieval Rome, shrinks it down to the size of a city-state (Firenze), and then broadcasts it back out into the world under various guises: Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Liberalism, Socialism, Utilitarianism, Capitalism, Communism, Consumerism, etc. Riddle : Name 3 isms that are incompatible with Machiavellianism. Give up? Answer: Hasidism, Catholicism…and Anarchism. Sidebar : Utilitarianism (Mill et al.) sounds good and is accepted in some form by a majority of today’s political theorists. It is an algorithm with an infinite number of possible solutions. It includes solutions that distribute the total ‘good’ as equally as possible… as well as solutions where all ‘good’ is conferred on a single individual. On its very face, utilitarianism contradicts Catholic social teaching. It fetishizes the theoretical and ignores the concrete; it substitutes a mechanical algorithm for human charity and solidarity. It has Machiavelli’s grubby ink-stained fingerprints all over it. (Sorry, not a fan!) Anarchism, on the other hand, does not preclude the evolution of institutions of social order. On the contrary, it anticipates them; but the keyword here is ‘evolution’. Imposed order is not at all the same thing as organic order . Anarchism celebrates the fact that true order evolves naturally from the bottom up; but hierarchy certainly has a role to play in this process. The hierarchy is the vanguard. The priests marched at the head of Joshua’s column as it moved to ‘liberate’ the Promised Land. Hierarchy can jump start and guide process, but it cannot replace process. There are no just acts without God’s Justice, but God’s Justice is only operative in the world through just acts. What we call ‘liberalism’ (Locke, Mill, Rousseau, et al.) is merely an elaborate mask for the hierarchical State. Its ‘consent of the governed’ is an ‘origin myth’ that is contradicted by three facts: (1) the state of nature , presumed to pre-date that ‘consent’ never existed; (2) there is no definable process that could constitute ‘consent’ in the broad existential sense implied here (such consent would instantly create a new form of bondage which is a prime facie violation of human rights); (3) once consent has been given it is apparently binding on all generations to come: the sins of the father… The phenomenon of State, as it is today, is very different from the concept of state as it appears in Catholic doctrine. The ‘state’ of the encyclicals is merely the broadest, most general expression of community . Such a state recognizes voluntary human associations as embedded, necessarily, in the ecological order. Anarchism does not oppose order; au contraire , it liberates it so that we can celebrate it. The ability of human beings to form just and ordered communities is one of our species’ defining characteristics. Even Cain built cities! ‘Statists’ do not view order as natural. They understand society as essentially ‘fallen’ and therefore in need of an externally imposed standard of right conduct… as long as that standard does not come from God or Church. Anarchists deny this reasoning altogether. They view humans as God’s partners in the ordering process, not as luddites ‘hell bent’ on sabotaging any such order. To the statist, sovereignty rests at the most general level of association, the nation state, or now perhaps the so-called New World Order . The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity views the problem through the other end of the telescope. Sovereignty rests at the level of the individual and her proximate social networks (e.g., family). According to such a model, ‘consent of the governed’ is not ‘one and done’ but a perpetual process, happening, or not, every minute of every day. The consensus that Anarchism is inconsistent with Christianity looks a bit odd in the light of history. In fact, there have been two significant, long term, attempts to rebuild Western society according to Anarchist principles; both enjoyed considerable success, yet both have disappeared from the contemporary political landscape. Wonder why! After the Exodus, when the Hebrews emerged from the wilderness and marched on Jericho, they began a 250-year long social experiment. From the death of Moses to the coronation of Saul, society, guided by the grace of God and the precepts of Torah , functioned without a permanent political class and without any formal central government. Authority was vested in God, his people, and a series of charismatic judges (Joshua through the sons of Samuel) whose authority derived solely from the favor of God and the consent of the governed (e.g., a council of elders). The Exodus granted the Israelites a quasi-unique opportunity in history…a blessed do over . Unlike the Jacobins of 1789, the Hebrews wandering in the Widlerness had no Ancien Regime to erradicate. They did not inherit a bunch of old political structures in need of reform, and for the most part, they were free of foreign interference. They were given a chance to build a society, ab initio , from the bottom up…and they did just that, brilliantly. This lengthy period in Jewish history is recounted in three books of the Old Testament: Joshua , Judges , and the first 7 chapters of I Samuel . The final line of Judges summarizes the entire era: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his (sic) own eyes.” (21: 25) By all accounts, this early experiment in anarchism was quite successful. In our era, we are used to folks seeking to liberate themselves from physical bondage, cultural oppression, and political tyranny. Over the course of history, however, humans have just as often sought to trade their existential liberty for the promise, always empty, of security and prosperity. Erich Fromm explored this phenomenon in his book, Escape from Freedom . So did the author of I Samuel . The people cried out to Samuel, “Appoint a king over us, like the nations, to rule us…Give us a king to rule us.” Samuel, with God’s help, tried his best to talk the people out of their folly, but no cigar; and the rest, as they say, is History…brutal, brutal History. As James Joyce wrote, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Now fast forward 1500 years: the Fall of Rome has once again created a political vacuum, this time in Europe. Armed with a trendy new ideology, Christianity , the people set about the creation of a new social order; call it Christendom . Once again, the operation was a huge success…but once again, the patient died. Feudalism was a dazzling display of decentralized economic power and political authority; it was Blockchain before Bitcoin: the Manor, the Abbey, the Village, the Cite, the Guild, and by all means least, the ‘island state’. This is not the place to recount the breath-taking achievements of the so-called Middle Ages. Suffice to point out just a few highlights: The ossified philosophy and theology of the late classical period gave way to new and vibrant ways of thinking. Van Gogh and Gaudi notwithstanding, Europe’s greatest treasures of art and architecture date from Middle Ages. The Middle Ages saw an evolution from slavery to serfdom to citizenship (only to be replaced later by colonialism, imperialism, and wage slavery). In 999, more people lived in Cordoba, Spain than live today in Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, or St. Louis…and they had sidewalks and street lamps. Some Dark Ages! Again, however, the ‘glory that was Rome’ proved too much of a lure. Christians abandoned their own rich culture in a vain attempt to resurrect a desiccated Classical Civilization that had peaked 1500 years earlier. Enter Leo XIII ( italics are mine in all that follows ): “ All public power must proceed from God, for God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception , must be subject to Him and serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely God, the sovereign ruler of all.” (ID #3, see below.) Separation of Church and State? Maybe. Separation of God and Society? Never! “Whatever be the nature of government, rulers must bear in mind that God is the paramount ruler of the world and must set Him before themselves in the administration of the State.“ (ID #4) Is this not exactly how Joshua, Deborah, Gideon, Samuel, et al. governed Canaan for 250 years? “If the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own authority and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is not justice, is null.” (D #15) “Civil laws…so long as they are just, derive from the law of nature their binding force (RN #11)… Laws bind only when they are in accordance with right reason and, hence , with the eternal law of God.” (RN #52) “Man (sic) precedes the state, and possesses, prior to the formation of any state, the right of providing for the sustenance of his body.” (RN #7) Jean Valjean ( Les Misérables ) was wrongly convicted! 100 years later, Pope John Paul II glossed Leo’s Rerum Novarum : “The right of association is a natural right of the human being, which therefore precedes his or her incorporation into political society.” (CA #7) “A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order.” (CA #48) Is that not Star Trek’s Prime Directive ? “By state we here understand…any government conformable in its institutions to right reason and natural law, and to…dictates of the divine wisdom.” (RN #32) Leo builds his concept of right order on three legs of a tripod: God’s law, natural law, and reason. Leo is not just jousting with heretical states. He is ‘disestablishing’ them! A heretical state is not a bad state in the way that a stubborn male child might be called, “a bad boy”, but still be a boy. A heretical state is not a state at all. There are no bad states . There are only states and pseudo-states . Jesus began his ministry ( Luke 4:21) by proclaiming a Jubilee year (redistribution of all productive property); in the same way, Leo proclaimed the withering away of Europe’s nation states. Unlike Marx, Leo did not promise the dissolution of the heretical State; he dissolved it by fiat! No, not just by fiat, but by the application of Scripture. Finally, Leo quotes Aquinas: “Human law is only law by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and it is thus manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence .” (RN #52) D = Diuturnum , 1881 ID = Immortale Dei , 1885 RN = Rerum Novarum , 1891 CA = Centesimus Annus , 1991 Image: James Tissot (French, 1836-1902). Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees (Malheur à vous, scribes et pharisiens), 1886-1894. Opaque watercolor over graphite on gray wove paper, Image: 6 11/16 x 10 3/8 in. (17 x 26.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchased by public subscription, 00.159.209 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum). 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 Groundhog Issue 2025 Previous Next

< Back Dr. Stuti Pardhe Contributor Dr. Stuti Pardhe is a dedicated professional with a broad spectrum of experience spanning social work, clinical therapy, and alternative modalities. With a profound commitment to mental and public health, she aspires to be a global Brand Ambassador and Role Model, leaving a positive impact on humanity. The Science Behind the 7-Second Rule

< Back Choices that Lead to Deception Magesh I often ponder over what drives individuals to opt for a deceitful path rather than a righteous one. Lately, I've been contemplating the divergent decisions people make in identical situations. I often ponder over what drives individuals to opt for a deceitful path rather than a righteous one. This article delves into the opportunities presented to me and those around me, focusing on how my faith guided me towards the right choices. As a musician, I've had the privilege of performing worldwide alongside multiple Grammy Award-winning artists. Throughout my years in the music industry, I've witnessed and encountered occurrences that some may only encounter through reading. While this industry teems with opportunities, it also harbors behaviors steeped in scandal. My steadfast relationship with God shielded me from the allure of drugs, alcohol, and other negative influences. In my earlier years as an up-and-coming musician, I received a call from a prominent nightclub owner, who owned the most sought-after spot in town. This establishment drew eager crowds every night to witness local and international bands. A sudden opportunity arose when the singer of a renowned band scheduled for a Sunday performance fell ill. They asked if my band could fill in for a 9 pm show the following night, offering us a generous fee of $700—an excellent start for a budding band. Upon arriving for the soundcheck, I was astonished to find a queue forming outside the club, hours before the show commenced. The club owner, as I set up my drums, remarked, 'I hope you're ready, kid!' The audience greeted us with cheers from the first note. They had come expecting the previously scheduled band but embraced our music, talent, and positive vibe. Perhaps our backstage group prayer played a role! At the night's end, when I approached the club owner for payment, I was met by his brother, as the owner had left due to illness. Reassuring me, he handed over a brown paper bag. Only upon reaching home did I realize it contained $5,000 instead of the agreed $700. A miscommunication had occurred—his assumption being that we were the established band. I immediately contacted my older bandmate, suggesting we return the excess. Recalling Corinthians 4:2, emphasizing faithfulness in entrusted matters, I recognized this as a test from God and resolved to pass. The following day, I returned to the club, acknowledging the mistake in payment. Astonished by my honesty, the owner not only corrected the error but also offered my band a regular spot every Tuesday for five years. Although keeping the money would have been easier, the long-term benefits of doing the right thing were immeasurable. Years later, I crossed paths with the bass player who initially suggested keeping the money. He confided in me that his dishonest actions had led to being 'blacklisted' by numerous recording studios and clubs. While he didn't elaborate, it was evident his dubious behavior had consequences. In 2005, while touring with a world-renowned pop star, our band encountered a scenario at a Sydney studio. We discovered a bag containing $7,000 left behind. Without hesitation, I declared that we must act honestly, quoting not only biblical teachings but also recognizing the value of integrity. One of the band members, a young man from the Middle East, commended my wisdom in prioritizing honesty. In jest, I attributed it to Corinthians 8:21, highlighting the significance of honesty in actions. Returning the money proved fortuitous as it belonged to an Italian immigrant, his life savings inadvertently left behind. My decisions to uphold honesty were profoundly influenced by the teachings I held dear. This integrity didn't just establish me as a talented musician but also as an upright individual. It fostered invaluable relationships with tour managers, club owners, and studio staff, underscoring that success in the music industry wasn't solely grounded in talent but also in honesty. 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. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next