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Deep dive into the crossroads of theology, philosophy, and cosmology. Cosmology is where Science and Philosophy converge in their search for a Theory of Everything (TOE). The Eternal Present “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” Read More Life on Mars “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" Read More The Probability of Nothing “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Read More Is the Universe Real “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” Read More Playing with Blocks “Everything I needed to know about cosmology, I learned watching my grandchildren play with blocks.” Read More The Frost Diamond “God is ‘special’ only to that extent that in God, A and Ω are the same event.” Read More Determinism…or Entanglement? “Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.” Read More Returning to Andromeda “What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way!” Read More Past, Present, Future "So, it turns out that the universe did not have a lot of options when it came to structuring time." Read More A Universe From Nothing I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is! Read More Cosmic Crossroads You say, "Big Bang;" we say, "Genesis." You say, "Constantine;" we say, "Ascension." Read More A Theory of Everything (TOE) Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE. Read More The Nature of Time Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. Read More Quark Soup “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?” Read More

Science and Technology Science delivers the raw material that becomes Philosophy and Theology; then it tests their propositions against data from ‘the real world’. My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” Read More How to Build a Warp Drive “Buckle up! While your friends are lining up for a trip to Mars, you’re headed for Alpha Centauri…and beyond!” Read More Psilocybin “If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?” Read More A Brief History of Motion “Zeno exploited the continuity of Real Numbers to show…that motion is incompatible with Arithmetic.” Read More Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” Read More Pando and Me “Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!” Read More Genesis and Quantum Computing “Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all.” Read More Life Imitates AI “We trained our bots to imitate us and now, voilà! We are imitating our bots.” Read More The Problem of Waste “(Theology) will have to account, not just for the evil in the world, but for something much worse in modern eyes…the inefficiency of the world.” Read More What Is Time? An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... Read More Read My Mind! “What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts.” Read More Of Mice and Mirrors “On a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor.” Read More Bacteria Are People Too “I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisian café. They don’t need to study existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day.” Read More Follow the Science “Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…” Read More Causality & the B-Gita “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” Read More Time for a New Turing Test “…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.” Read More To Bot or Not to Bot “Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that?” Read More AI, Justice, and Job “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” Read More Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." Read More AI for Healthcare “Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?” Read More Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” Read More SETI “It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.” Read More AI and Marxism “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” Read More Artificial Intelligence “Aletheia Today Magazine will devote its entire Fall Issue (9/1/23) to Artificial Intelligence…and we’d love to include YOU in the conversation.” Read More Where the Time Goes “I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.” Read More Our Visitor From Andromeda “'Distributed intelligence' challenges our ideas of God and of Nature; but it may offer a pathway to a new and better theory of cosmogenesis.” Read More Pando “How are you at riddles? Let’s see!” Read More Our Inanimate Neighbors “Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location… Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks.” Read More Who Invented the Internet “Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD...” Read More Be a Bee Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! Read More Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part II In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight! Read More Common Sense Academy Routs Info Tech, 97 - 3 "Imagine that the Borg Collective and Jean Luc Picard had a baby…" Read More Science and the Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Read More Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! Read More Electricity “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world. From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception. Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour? The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable. In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come? Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable. We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world. Read More 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. Read More Hidden Life An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities? Read More Trees According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light. Read More

Aletheia Today magazine essays for children and families and exploring faith, religion, and questions about the universe. Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Articles of special interest to younger readers (also articles submitted by younger writers) Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry, usually consisting of 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Does this formal rigor seem like it would be inhibiting? The reverse is true. It’s liberating! Haiku Corner Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry, usually consisting of 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Does this formal rigor seem like it would be inhibiting? The reverse is true. It’s liberating! Learn about Haiku? Read some Haiku? (See below.) Write and submit a Haiku? (We may publish it in a later issue.) Join (or start) a Renga Cycle (our “Japanese Poetry Slam”). Haiku Read More Renga Cycle 1 Read More Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue

Essays in Aletheia Today magazine relating to scripture and how to incorporate scripture into family, life, work, and daily life. Plus, original prayers, reflections, and meditations. Spirituality Mar 1, 2024 I'm Ageless and Timeless “I am a spy; I can sense it, but I have no spy craft, no Bond-tech, and no ‘should you choose to accept it’ mission.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Is Techno-Optimism a New Religion? “This is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Happiness “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Ave Maria “Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession… (but) imagine OJ without his Dream Team.” Read More Jun 1, 2023 The Our Father “This tiny prayer…is a cyber-wonks dream. The density of the information content is out of this world, quite literally!” Read More Jun 1, 2023 The Structure of Prayer Formal Christian Prayer is a cornucopia of spirituality. Yet in the Roman Catholic tradition at least, two prayers stand out: Jesus' prayer, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary (Ave Maria). Read More Apr 15, 2023 My Breastplate Read More Oct 15, 2022 St. Paul’s Lord’s Prayer “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to entire prayer. Read More Oct 15, 2022 St. Paul’s Lord’s Prayer “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to entire prayer. Read More Oct 15, 2022 Faith, Hope, and Love This excerpt from the writings of St. Paul is among the best-known passages in Judeo-Christian scripture. But what does it really mean? Read More Sep 1, 2022 Serenity Prayer Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? Read More Jul 5, 2022 Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine. Read More May 29, 2022 Being a Faith Chaplain in a Secular World As a chaplain, I am allowed to talk about faith or pray with a client if that is what he or she wants. Like many people in our secular and even religious society, I am to be there for ‘those of all faiths or none.’ Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue Spirituality is the practice of Philosophy and Theology; it is the ‘How To’ for those who “walk in the valley of the shadow of death.”

Philosophers Philosophers are artists working in the medium of ideas. They function both as landmarks and as signposts in our never-ending search for Truth. After Parmenides What to "Western philosophy is the history of our effort to understand the silence of Parmenides, or to break it." Read More Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” Read More Beyond Pascal's Wager “Once we get past skyscrapers and suspension bridges, we really have no idea what’s going on, do we?” Read More Robert Frost Was Wrong “Waiter, bring me one order of everything on the menu and when I’ve finished, I’ll pay for whatever dish I liked best.” Read More Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More 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.” Read More Boethius “The ultimate pattern of events is determined, while the specific events that form that pattern are entirely undetermined.” Read More Thrown by Heidegger “Of course, I have no name, no face, no identity; I belong nowhere.” Read More Albert Camus “Either death is ultimately subjected to something greater and more general than itself (Being) or death ultimately subjects everything to itself and then nothing else has any meaning or value.” Read More Friedrich Nietzsche “Value-based judgments assume a transcendent point of view and sooner or later, that way of thinking leads to God-talk and any such talk is strictly verboten.” Read More Chatting With C.S. Lewis “It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.” Read More LEIBNIZ “In this model, God is a giant switching station, sharing qualities among myriad monads.” Read More

Aletheia Today magazine essays relating to religious writings, beliefs, values, and traditions held by Judaism and Christianity Theology Theology is the intersection of Philosophy and Mythology where we consider matters of ultimate concern. Apr 1, 2025 Miracles “…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.” Read More Apr 1, 2025 Is There ‘True Religion’? “We confuse a person’s right to express a hairbrained idea with the notion that that idea should be taken seriously.” Read More Feb 1, 2025 Apocalypse Now! “We are not midway through the Second Act of a Mystery Play called Salvation… Brunhilda has sung; we just need to applaud!” Read More Dec 1, 2024 Jesus Gets Us! “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” Read More Dec 1, 2024 R U Body, Soul or Spirit? “Are soul and spirit just two names for one concept…and do we need either?” Read More Oct 15, 2024 World Without God Amen “God is dead, and we have killed him…who will wipe this blood from us?” (Nietzsche) Read More Sep 1, 2024 Mark’s Diary – Notes for a Screenplay “And so they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, Jesus leading the way, and the disciples were filled with awe, while those who followed behind were afraid.” Read More Sep 1, 2024 Is Christology a TOE “Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….” Read More Sep 1, 2024 The Mustard Seed “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds find shelter in its branches.” (Matthew 13: 31 – 32) Read More Aug 29, 2024 Show Us a Sign! “We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!” Read More Jul 15, 2024 God is a Bother! “The reason most people don’t believe in God is that they haven’t fully considered the alternative.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Job Verses God: The Trial of the Epoch “Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Empirical Argument “Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” Read More Jun 1, 2024 Proof of God: The Ontological Argument “Value permeates every nook and cranny of the World. God is Value… No values – no world...” Read More Jun 1, 2024 The Beatles and John “Both Johns looked out their respective windows and saw their worlds on fire. Both Johns situated their profound and ultimately hopeful message in that apocalyptic context.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Marx vs. Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How-To manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” Read More Apr 15, 2024 Sacramental Priesthood “I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Philip Goff “You’ll end up living life as though you were counting cards at a Black Jack table in Las Vegas – in other words, profitably! But it’s still gambling.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 The Theology of Science-Fiction Can AI have soul ? Read More Jan 15, 2024 Faith Is Not Belief Without Evidence "Faith is not belief without evidence; it's the content of a relationship with God and is based upon the private experience of God's love." Read More Jan 15, 2024 A ‘New’ Old Theory of Consciousness “The simplest unicellular species display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature.” Read More Dec 1, 2023 Re-Imagining the Magnificat "In our zeal to project our conceptions of The Ideal Woman onto this enigmatic first-century figure, we’ve strayed a bit from the little we do know." Read More Dec 1, 2023 Christ and the Kids “So what is it that makes children so much better than us? First…a child is not a ‘mini-you’… Is an Octopus a mini-you? Then neither is a child.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Idolatry “An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” Read More Oct 15, 2023 “Is God Dead?” “Right now, scientists and philosophers all over the world are engaged in the search for a ‘TOE’, a Theory of Everything…(but) we already have such a TOE.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 The 7th Day “Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” Read More Oct 15, 2023 Satan, Mary, and ‘Da Judge’ “Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...” Read More Sep 1, 2023 ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Sep 1, 2023 Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More Jul 15, 2023 The Theology of Mikhail Bakunin “Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 A Jewish Approach to Cognitive Dissonance "I would like to be an intellectually honest spiritual seeker, a warm and loving and dynamic wife and mother, a supportive friend; but at the end of the day, I look in the mirror, and see an annoyed and tired dish rag, and all I want to do is have a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Warm dynamic spiritual seeker aside, anyone who stands between me and my mug is in for it." Read More Jul 15, 2023 Eucharist “…The spacetime world of matter and energy, 14 billion years old and almost 100 billion light years across, is not the final word.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Korach Over Dinner "Like most people of my generation, I cringe when I hear the M word." Read More Jun 1, 2023 God’s Will “We can say that God wills the events that constitute the world, even though God does not in any way cause those events to occur.” Read More Jun 1, 2023 Whitehead and Zohar “Zohar and Whitehead, separated by more than 500 years, both deliver us a map of the world where X marks the spot of the eschatological treasure.” Read More Apr 15, 2023 Mary Magdalene, The Witness "That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in his kingdom that Jesus ever delivered." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Growing Into Pentecost "In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Matzah of Hope--Passover Part One "This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms." Read More Apr 15, 2023 Tantum Ergo Read More Mar 1, 2023 Two-Faced God “All gods are two faced…and that’s not blasphemy!” Read More Mar 1, 2023 Hell “Nobody believes in Hell anymore…and that’s a good thing.” Read More Jan 15, 2023 Educating Christians “We must teach our children a totally counter-cultural model of nature. We must teach the doctrines of our Faith, not as exceptions to natural law, but as the highest expressions of natural law.” Read More Nov 30, 2022 Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Read More Oct 15, 2022 What Did John See? The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why? Read More Oct 15, 2022 A Theory of Everything (TOE) Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE. Read More Jul 13, 2022 Competing Creeds Suppose we were to express our generation's secular worldview as a 'creed,' how would it read? Read More Jul 13, 2022 The Great Commandment “The second is like it…” Really? The second is like it? Like it? At first glance, this seems ridiculous. The two verses don’t look alike at all. One concerns our relationship with God, the Almighty, the creator of heaven and earth; the other concerns our relationship with the jerk down the street who doesn’t mow his lawn and plays his music loud on Saturday nights. Read More Jul 12, 2022 The People's 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? Read More May 29, 2022 Christology 101 “…Without Christ, the World would consist of a vast multiplicity of isolated events, a sea of ships passing in the night.” Read More May 28, 2022 Jesus Meets Mister Spock Science and Religion should assist each other in pursuing the truth. Science can be too closed to the life of the spirit, the mind, imagination, thought, and creativity. Religion can be closed to anything new that threatens its perception of reality. Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Follow the Science “Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…” David Cowles Remember the Alamo and Follow the Science – words to live by, memes that inspire generations! We love science…and why shouldn’t we? I lived through all the painful and potentially lethal childhood diseases; today we have vaccines. I grew up without the “vast wasteland” (Newton Minow) known as ‘television’, and no video games. Quelle domage! How did I ever survive? When I wanted to know something, I had to travel to something called a ‘library’ and search through its stacks. Then I learned to ‘Ask Google’ to assemble relevant research materials for me. Now I can just wake up my bot, Claude, and he will do my research for me. He’ll even write my report for me if I choose. So follow the science? You bet! There is just one small glitch: not a single proposition in the ‘library of science’ is true! Or false, for that matter. Not one. Take calculus, for example. Without calculus, it is unlikely that any of the technological advances mentioned above would have occurred. The world appears to be continuous along all four dimensions, but it isn’t. This is the nub of the famous paradox proposed by Parmenides’ pal, Zeno of Elea, a mere 2,500 years ago. Calculus can do what Zeno couldn’t; it lets us treat the discontinuous as if it were continuous. It’s not true, of course! Discontinuity is still discontinuity, but calculus allows us to disregard that discontinuity and treat all phenomena as continuous. It’s a bit like geometry. As far as we know, there are no purely Euclidean universes. Yet, the postulates and theorems of Euclidean geometry have revealed much about the substructural order of the phenomenal world. “Something there is that does not love a wall.” (Robert Frost) There are no straight lines! Yet by studying the properties of straight lines, we can learn about that which is not so straight. Euclidean geometry assumes a flat universe in which lines can be straight and angles can be sharp. We don’t live in such a universe, but we can learn about our universe by studying Euclid’s pseudo-verse. Same with calculus! Same with science! Modern science studies with unimaginable depth and precision something that does not exist, i.e., a continuous world. Scientific Method (SM) allows us to probe the world with incredible precision. Anyone who made it through the 5 th grade knows the details of SM by heart: Observe, question, hypothesize, experiment, and interpret. And if you were too cool for school, you know that anyway (without the labels) because you’ve lived…likewise many of your unstuffed animal friends. The fundamental premise of SM is this: If you perform identical actions in an identical environment (e.g., laboratory), you will achieve identical results. SM is ‘AA certified’: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. So the non-thetic scientific method is a hardwired feature of epistemology in our biosphere. Perhaps it is a product of evolution (physical and/or cultural); it certainly confers ‘advantage’ on those able to use it. But the whole house of cards rests on a normally unnoticed and unstated foundation – the assumption that any event can ever be repeated. In fact, every event is unique. It is a fundamental premise of ontology (Whitehead), the foundation on which all science must be built, that no two events can ever be the same. If they were, they would be one event, not two. ‘Same’ is a mathematical concept (‘equality’), not a physical reality. But there are no identical events, and therefore it is never possible to perform the same actions under the same circumstances. The scientific method is logical and practical, and it yields amazingly useful insights, but its propositions are utterly vacuous, fruits of a forbidden tree. SM is a useful epistemology that rests on an invalid ontology! “This is what a unicorn would look like…if unicorns existed.” Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis . But the universe is also conservative….just conservative enough, as it turns out. If it were more conservative, we’d be in permanent gridlock; less conservative, chaos. Consider Events A and B. Let’s assume that B is as similar to A as any event can be to any other event. They are separated by a ‘quantum of difference’ - what Jacques Derrida called ‘ differance ’. Where do we find this ‘B’? Next to A, obviously. Dah! Neat trick! How’dya do it? Spacetime! Not a substructural feature of universe as we had long believed but rather a map of that universe. Spacetime is not the substructure of universe - it is a map, not a blueprint. Every map is the projection of a field according to a map-specific set of rules. One such map is spacetime , drawn so that every ‘B’ is adjacent to its ‘A’, of course. Spacetime is Minecraft on steroids. We assemble virtual blocks to create multidimensional structures, environments, etc. It is this map that makes it possible for the scientific method to ‘work’, even though it rests on a fallacious ontology. So push our science to the max and take advantage of all the gorgeous fruit it produces, but beware: Do not confuse the fruit (phenomena) with the tree (noumenon), do not confuse the map with the territory! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Share Previous Next

< Back Peace at Any Price David Cowles Jun 29, 2023 “We cannot bring about a permanent peace while continually preparing for war, but unilateral disarmament is probably not the answer either.” Growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I was steeped in an ideology that is almost absent from global discourse today. I’m not talking about fascism or communism, still alive and well in some circles, but something ultimately much more radical: pacificism. The experience of two world wars with all their attendant horrors, culminating in the Holocaust, had apparently cured humanity of its taste for war. The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan was the coup de grace . War had become unthinkable at last. The nations of the world came together and formed the United Nations (UN), which was to oversee the peaceful arbitration of all future disputes. Peace at last! Churchill and Truman ceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union rather than confront Stalin. England validated Gandhi’s strategy of non-violence by withdrawing from the Indian subcontinent. Colonial powers rapidly, and for the most part peacefully, dismantled their empires. A permanent homeland was created for Israel. A ‘Reign of Peace’ had replaced the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. What could possibly go wrong? It was the dawn of a much anticipated golden age – no matter that war was still raging in parts of Asia (e.g., Korea). It was a time of slogans: “Ban the Bomb,” “Peace at any Price,”and “Better Red than Dead.” Western politicians seriously proposed and campaigned on platforms of Unilateral Disarmament . The world was divided again, but this time it was ‘reactionary war mongers’ vs. ‘naïve utopian peaceniks’. The golden age of peace turned out to be more like a half-holiday. The Cold War, the nuclear arms race, ‘duck and cover’ drills, the Hungarian Revolution (1956), Castro’s Cuba, and the launch of Sputnik kept peace from breaking out. Then came Vietnam and the global revolution of the late 1960s. The peace movement became the anti-war movement, which in turn became Ho Chi Minh’s 5 th column in the US. In less than 20 years, war, supposedly unthinkable, had become the new normal…again. The idea of ‘waging peace’ did not begin on August 6, 1945, with the bombing of Hiroshima. It turns out to have much older roots. The Hebrew nation that Moses led out of Egypt conquered Jericho, the Gotham of its day, without a single Hebrew casualty (as far as we know). Joshua combined a revolutionary ideology with a network of spies and secret agents and God-scripted military tactics worthy of General Giap himself. Ian Fleming should have written a book about him (call him “J”). Once settled, the Hebrews did not build massive fortifications or raise a standing army like other nations. Nor did they choose to put their fate in the hands of warrior kings. In fact, the embryonic Hebrew state in Canaan was not a ‘government’ at all by our standards. It was a remarkable blend of theocracy, democracy, and anarchy. The books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel can be read as ‘founding documents’ for all the major political ideologies of the most recent quarter-millennium (1770s – 2020s). Speaking of quarter-millennia, the great social experiment we recognize as proto-Israel lasted approximately that long (c. 1300 – 1050 BCE). Like any historical period, the Age of Judges had its ups and downs. Without permanent institutions of government, a ruling class, a standing army, fortifications or naturally defensible borders, Israel was forced to rely on charismatic leaders (judges) who emerged on cue and ad hoc to defend the Holy Land. Scholars and theologians disagree as to whether the Mosaic revolution was intended to be national, regional, or global. Suffice to say that it succeeded nationally and influenced regionally but failed internationally. It would be another 2,000 years before the Kingdom of Joshua (albeit much altered) could reasonably be said to extend ‘to all corners of the known world’ (Christendom). As Trotsky would have predicted, had he lived in the time of the Judges, the people of Israel were not content with their unusual, if successful, constitution. Like all of us in our adolescent phase, the people of Israel wanted to ‘be like everyone else’ – they wanted a King, and so Samuel, the last of the Judges, inaugurated Saul to be Israel’s first king. How did that work out? Fast forward 500 years. Jerusalem has been sacked, and Israel’s most prominent citizens exiled to Babylon. Should’ve listened to YHWH! We cannot bring about a permanent peace while continually preparing for war, but unilateral disarmament is probably not the answer either. How about changing the conversation, focusing on things that would make war intrinsically unprofitable…and so ultimately unthinkable? Prosperity: the overall wealth of the people, justly distributed. Ecology: the overall health of the planet and reasonable protection for all its species. Progress: the rapid development but thoughtful deployment of new technologies. Discovery: the exploration of the universe by telescope, radio antennae, space probes, and space travel. No imaginable war could be consistent with any one of these priorities. Consider the war in Ukraine: how does it contribute anything positive toward any of these objectives from the perspective of any of the combatants? It is a classic lose-lose proposition. In fact, since WWII, all our wars, win or lose, have led to a similar result - no result at all. Korea is still Korea, Vietnam is still Vietnam, Cuba, Cuba, Latin America, Latin America, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and of course, Afghanistan. War has become as irrelevant as it is unthinkable. And yet… Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Matzah of Hope--Passover Part One B.J. Yudelson "This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms." You may remember that back in the ’70s and ’80s, we added a fourth matzah to the three required for the Seder and called it the Matzah of Hope. It was a symbol of the three million Soviet Jews who had no freedom to be Jews. Some twenty or thirty years later, our united voices had changed the situation. I propose that this year we once again add a fourth matzah to our Seder table and read the following. What do you think? Maybe together we can change the situation for the Agunot, women anchored to men who neither want them as wives nor are willing to free them to lead their own lives. This matzah, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the thousands of women who are anchored to marriages in name only, reminds us that slavery comes in many forms. Three thousand years ago, Jewish women were forced to see their baby sons die. They themselves were forced to follow the orders of the Egyptian masters to make bricks and perform other onerous tasks. Today, there are women enslaved to unsustainable marriages. The common term for them is “chained” women. But the Hebrew, agunah, comes from the root that means “to anchor.” These women, who have asked for a divorce but are dependent upon their husbands for the “get” that completes the divorce procedure, are anchored in place by men who refuse to comply. Tethered under water, it is as if they are mired in the muck on the bottom. Although the water that swirls about them represents opportunity, freedom, the ability to navigate to new and different Jewish places, they can barely breathe. How tantalizing to be surrounded by freedom yet to be prohibited from leading the free, fulfilling Jewish lives they crave. These women can dream of a new life, of new experiences that await them in a different part of this lake or sea they are trapped in. But they can’t, by themselves, hoist the anchor to change their situations. They need our support: our prayers, our petitions, our demonstrations. They need for us to convince our rabbis to take action, for where there is a rabbinic will, there will be found a rabbinic way to free agunot. As we set aside this matzah in their honor, let us pledge to do more in the coming year to free all agunot from the bondage that weighs particularly heavily as we celebrate freedom this Seder night. This was republished with permission from T he Jewish Pluralist . It is first in the series Four Women’s Collected Essays on the Meaning of Passover . Click here for introduction to the series. This essay was also published on B.J. Yudelson website. Image: Passover Seder, 19th Century B.J. is an explorer who loves both the comfort of the familiar and the challenge of the unknown. As a child growing up in Atlanta, she knew the size and position of every tree in the wooded ravine behind her house as well as the best rocks for crossing the creek at the bottom. When she passes a street repeatedly, she may suddenly turn onto it just to find out where it goes, making the unknown familiar. World religions, her own beloved Judaism, a foreign country, or a local park all bring out the explorer in her. She writes to make sense of the inner landscapes of family and friends, the ins and outs of her community (currently, Rochester, New York), and the beauty of loon-filled lakes. Her writings—published in a variety of literary journals, websites, and anthologies —explore family, Judaism, nature, and overcoming obstacles. She invites you to join her on her adventures. Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back Being David Copperfield David Cowles Oct 17, 2023 “Most of us would rather be a well-drawn character in a Stephen King novel than a real person.” When I began writing David Copperfield , I knew I had my work cut out for me. To capture the panorama of life in 19 th century England, I needed to invent dozens of unique and interesting characters: Aunt Betsey, Mr. Murdstone, Tommy Traddles, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber, and of course, Agnes Wickfield, to name just a few. Each of these characters, even Davey himself, needed a backstory and a constellation of motivations to account for their actions. Each character needed to be memorable but also believable, a tall order for any author. Nevertheless, my novel was well received. Now I am starting work on an autobiographical sequel. I’d planned to follow the same plot line, but I’ve already realized that this won’t work. Two problems: first, my hero…that’s me! (Ok, anti-hero, if you insist.) I’m no David Copperfield. To the extent that my character has a backstory and a personality that explains his behavior…that character is not me! Sigmund Freud notwithstanding, nothing accounts for my actions. Authors rely on characters’ backgrounds to explain their behavior. I do what I do. I was made in the image and likeness of God: “I will be what I will be.” (Exodus 3: 14) Most of the time, my actions do follow well-worn tracks. I find it’s easier to do what folks expect. Until I don’t! My life story starts out as a real page turner, suddenly morphs into a head scratcher, and ends up dusty and half-read on the shelf of someone’s rarely visited library. My second problem is you! Who R U? I need to know if I’m to include you in my novel. Are you really an alter-ego (a mini-me) or are you just a cardboard cutout rescued from the set of The Truman Show ? Have you passed the Turing Test? If not, I can test you right now. Luckily, I just bought a Manhattan skyscraper for this very purpose. So, please walk to the edge of my roof and tell me, what do you see on the sidewalk directly below? No? What are you afraid of, a gust of wind? You’re a 250-pound fire plug and today’s totally calm! Even my flag is limp. No, you’re not afraid of some imaginary gust; you’re afraid of yourself. You know that you could just as easily jump off the edge of my roof as not. Probably, you won’t; but maybe, just maybe, you will. It’s a chance you’re not willing to take. The stakes are unaffordably high. That uncertainty is what makes a life interesting…and a novel unreadable. Ok, you will? Great. And so you walk right up to the edge and give me a detailed report. Thank you; now I know that you are cardboard after all. Only a fictional character would throw caution to the wind. Or… perhaps you’re just very brave, or macho, or have a keen sense of balance; perhaps for some reason, you are anxious to please me and so you comply with my utterly unreasonable request. Or perhaps you are a real person and just pretending to be a piece of cardboard. As I stare at my still blank monitor, I realize that I am already embroiled in two of philosophy’s most intractable problems: (1) Other minds, and (2) Free will. We’re in love with determinism ! We love destiny, God’s will, and the laws of physics…anything so long as it’s not me . It’s the ultimate free lunch: order without responsibility! The Devil made me do it, so I’m not to blame, but boy-o-boy, did I ever enjoy myself in the process. Sin without its wages: ‘volunteer work’. Thank you, Lucifer, for the free ride! So, there will be no Autobiography, at least not in the mode of David Copperfield . Perhaps I could cobble together a curriculum vitae with a dramatis personae , but don’t expect any explanation of my actions or the actions of any of my characters. We are most definitely not in search of an author! Most of us would rather be a well-drawn character in a Stephen King novel than a real person. Being real is messy, unpredictable, and always disappointing. We’d love to have a persona we could rely on: “That’s just the sort of hairpin I am!” What better way to justify everything I do while taking responsibility for none of it? We all want to ‘be someone’. Tracy Chapman, Fast Car , “I had a feeling I could be someone.” Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront , “I coulda been someone.” Ricky, Boyz in the Hood , “I want to do something with my life; I want to be somebody.” So, we measure ourselves against various fictional characters. Speaking for myself, I’m not as good a dad as Father Knows Best , as good a kid as Leave it to Beaver , as good a spouse as The Good Wife, as good a criminal as The Blacklist , as good a friend as Cheers , as good a dog as Lassie . Yet I judge myself in comparison to these imaginary beings; and of course, I come up short! My celluloid heroes are smooth; they know who they are, their behavior is consistent, their lives have meaning. By comparison, I’m more of a hedgehog, a ball of sharp bristles, concealing endless contradictions, masking noxious self-doubt. My life is a meander, not a journey. Imagine Odysseus without his Ithaca – that’s me… and you too, unless you’re one of Jim Carey’s props. I can no more measure up to my fictional idols than wooden Pinocchio could measure up to Geppetto’s idea of ‘a real boy’. I am not just ‘less than’; I am entirely ‘other than’. Less than? Ok, I can improve. Other than? There’s nothing I can do. I’ll never be a rhinoceros. But I can surely die trying! Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Mythology Before Marvel Comics David Cowles “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” Most of what we know about Norse Mythology comes from Wagner ( The Ring ), Tolkien ( Lord of the Rings ), and Marvel Comics. Behind these secondary sources stand the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda . The former is a collection of poems, some dating back to the 9th century CE; the latter is the work of a single man, Snorri Sturluson of Iceland (c. 1220 CE). Unfortunately, these first written records date from a time when Christianity was already beginning to make a mark in the Northlands. It is a matter of scholarship to separate the original pre-Christian content from later Christian influences…and, happy you , we will not attempt that here! Sturluson’s singular contribution was to organize varied material from the Poetic Edda into a quasi-coherent narrative, but what makes the Prose Edda so important, and therefore our focus, is its mind-bending structure. Mythic thinking expresses itself in narrative. True to form, Sturluson sews together countless short stories into one overarching tale. It is no exaggeration to describe the Prose Edda as the first Autobiography of Everything, anticipating by 700 years the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Sturluson began by situating Norse mythology in the context of Hebrew proto history: “Almighty God created heaven and earth and all things in them, and lastly, two humans from whom generations are descended, Adam and Eve…After Noah’s flood, there lived eight people who inhabited the world, and from them generations have descended… “(But) the vast majority of mankind…neglected obedience to God and…refused (even) to mention the name of God. But who was there then to tell their children of the mysteries of God?” Wait, are we talking about the 13th century CE…or the 21st? According to Christian theology, God gave human being the gift of ‘reason’ so that even the ‘unchurched’ can discover Truth. Surprisingly, the same doctrine appears in Norse mythology: “(God) gave them a portion of wisdom so that they could understand all earthly things…what it could mean that earth and animals and birds had common characteristics in some things…They reasoned that the earth was alive. It fed all creatures and took possession of everything that died.” But at the same time, Sturluson also situated his Nordic narrative in an Hellenic context. Just as the New Testament is the merger of Jewish theology with pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, so Norse mythology is the intersection of the Greek myth and Christian metaphysics: “Near the middle of the world was…Troy. We call the land there Turkey…Twelve kingdoms were there and one high king…He was married to the daughter of the high king, Priam…They had a son (Hector); he was called Tror; we call him Thor…When he was ten…he was as beautiful to look at when he came among other people as when ivory is inlaid in oak. His hair is more beautiful than gold. When he was twelve, he had reached his full strength… “Then he traveled through many countries, explored all quarters of the world, and defeated unaided all the berserks and giants, one of the greatest dragons, and many wild animals. (Hercules?) In the northern part of the world, he came across a prophetess called Sibyl, whom we call Sif, and married her.” Eighteen generations later, a descendant of Thor and Sif was born: “A son whose name is Woden; it is him we call Odin. He was an outstanding person for wisdom and all sorts of accomplishments. His wife was called Frigida, whom we call Frigg. Odin had the gift of prophesy and so did his wife, and from this science he discovered that his name would be remembered in the northern part of the world and honored above all kings. For this reason, he became eager to set off from Turkey…” Note that 18 generations earlier, Thor had earlier left Turkey (Troy) and migrated to “the northern part of the world” (Scandinavia); now Thor’s descendant, Odin, recapitulates his ancestor’s journey. (Just as Jesus’ Flight into Egypt recapitulates the Exodus .) This will not be the last time that our narrative recapitulates. Mythic space is fractal space: patterns repeat - repetition at scale is the meta-pattern of process. Sturluson sees Troy as the cradle of civilization and is eager to associate it with Scandinavia. In this, he is channeling Virgil, whose Aeneid connects Troy with the founding of Rome. In fact, Troy is the mythological prototype for all cities. It is the City of Cain ( Enoch ), it is the City of Dioce (Ecbatana, Pound’s ‘city of patterned streets’), it is Midgard (Tolkien’s Middle Earth). It is worth noting that the two great powers of the first millennium CE both trace their origins to the defeated party in the Trojan War. “After that, he (Odin) proceeded north to where he was faced by the sea, the one which they thought encircled all lands, and set his son over the realm which is now called Norway…their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands.” When Gylfi (King of Sweden) entered what appeared to be Val-hall (Valhalla), “He saw three thrones, one above the other, and there were three men, one sitting in each…the one that sat in the lowest throne was king and was called High; next to him the one called Just-as-high, and the one sitting at the top was called Third.” The structure of divinity in the Prose Edda parallels, of course, the Christian doctrine of Trinity. There is one God (‘All-father’), but High, Just-as-High, and Third represent the three faces or personae of this one God. It is impossible not to see parallels with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Gyfli is invited to ask any questions he wishes; what follows reads something like the 1950s RCC Baltimore Catechism …or Chapter 17 of Joyce’s Ulysses : Q: Who is the highest and most ancient of all gods? A: He is called All-father in our language… Q: Where is this god, what power has he, and what great works has he performed? A: He lives throughout all ages, rules all his kingdom, and governs all things great and small…He made heaven and earth, the skies and everything in them…But his greatest work is that he made man and gave him a soul that shall live and never perish, though the body decay to dust or burn to ashes. Q: What was he doing before heaven and earth were made? A: Then he was among the frost-giants. Whaaaat? Before heaven and earth were made, there were ‘frost giants’? Yup! In Norse mythology, the ‘created’ universe as we know it (heaven and earth, Midgard ) is embedded in a much broader reality (a Norse ‘multiverse’). Q: What was the beginning? And how did things start? And what was there before? A: It was at the beginning of time, when nothing was; sand was not, nor sea, nor cool waves. Earth did not exist, nor heaven on high. The mighty gap ( Ginnungagap ) was, but no growth. Q: What were things like before generations came to be and the human race was multiplied? In answer to this question, High, Just-as-High and Third begin to set out the fundamental doctrines of Norse cosmology. The primal (‘uncreated’) cosmos consisted of a region of great heat ( Muspell ) and a region of great cold ( Niflheim ) with a chasm ( Ginnungagap ) between them (“the mighty gap”). Sparks from Muspell and icy rime from Niflheim spilled over into the ‘gap’ and formed a vapor. Again, it is impossible not to see parallels, this time with the secular ‘something from nothing’ cosmologies of the 20/21st centuries: ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’. A: There was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Ymir…and from him are descended the generations of frost giants…” Ymir lived on four rivers of milk (the four rivers that flowed through Eden?) that came from a cow ( Audhumla ) who fed herself by licking the salty rime stones found in Ginnungagap. As she licked the stones, sculptor-like, she began to uncover a human form latent in the rime-stones. Soon, “…there was a complete man. His name was Buri…He begot a son called Bor…(and Bor) had three sons. One was called Odin, the second Vili, the third Ve…And it is my belief that this Odin and his brothers must be the rulers of heaven and earth…” So this Odin…he was the son of Bor, the brother of Vili and Ve, and the grandson of Buri, who was ‘licked’ into existence by a cow. Ok I guess, but he is also the son of Thor and Sif (above). Norse Mythology requires a level of neuroplasticity that most of us have not enjoyed since kindergarten. Then again, the Book of Genesis also presents two distinct accounts of creation which differ in focus and detail. But it would be a big mistake to dismiss this as ‘child’s play’. It is just such neuroplasticity that Jesus says is necessary for one to enter the Kingdom of Heaven (e.g. Mt. 18: 3). We’re left to wonder: Are High, Just-as-High, and Third actually Odin, Vili and Ve? But we’re not done yet! Bor’s sons killed the giant Ymir. And…they drowned all the race of frost giants, except that one escaped with his household. Giants call him Bergelmir. He went up on to his ark (!) with his wife and was preserved there, and from them are descended the families of frost giants…” Noah? “They (Bor’s sons) took Ymir and transported him to the middle of Ginnungagap, and out of him made the earth; out of his blood came the sea and the lakes. The earth was made of flesh, and the rocks of the bones…They also took his skull and made out of it the sky and set it up over the earth…Then they took molten particles and sparks that…had shot out of the world of Muspell and set them in the middle of the firmament of the sky…” We ‘the enlightened’ think of life as a late stage epiphenomenal eruption out of inert matter. The Eddas reverse the relationship. ‘The heavens and the earth’ ( Gaia/Kosmos ) are fashioned out of living matter (Ymir). Life, not matter, is substructural. The Gospel of John (1: 1-4) testifies to a similar process: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God…All things came to be through him and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life.” So in Christian ontology as well as Norse mythology, life is the substructure of universe. The Prose Edda is like a Bach fugue: themes repeat, transformed. Note the complex ecosystem in place prior to creation, ‘before’ even the beginning of time. The primal entity, Ymir, feeds off of a pre-existent cow who produces milk from nourishment she receives by licking salty rime-stones. That process of licking in turn uncovers a second primal entity, Buri, from whom Odin, Vili and Ve are descended. These grandsons of Buri in turn kill Ymir, but they recycle his body as the raw material needed to create ‘heaven and earth’, i.e. space/time, matter/energy, the mortal realm. Care to stretch the envelope? Compare this process with the evolution of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells from their prokaryotic precursors. Essentially, two independent life forms ‘merged’ to form a single, symbiotic organism that became the basis for all animal and plant life on Earth. As above, this process happened only once in the history of terrestrial evolution. Q: How was the earth arranged? A: It is circular 'round the edge, and around it lies the deep sea, and along the shore of this sea they gave lands to live in to the race of giants. But on the earth, on the inner side, they made a fortification 'round the world against the hostility of giants, and for this fortification they used the giant Ymir’s eyelashes, and they called the fortification Midgard (‘Middle Earth’). Q. And where did the people come from who inhabit this world? A: As Bor’s sons walked along the seashore, they came across two logs and created people out of them. The first gave breath and life; the second consciousness and movement; the third a face, speech, hearing, and sight… This is a sophisticated Trinitarian model, similar to but importantly different from, the Christian model. First, the manifestations of God are allocated differently among the divine personae, and second, the phenomena associated with being human are grouped and segmented differently from how we might do it today. A (cont.): The man was called Ask, the woman Embla, and from them were produced the mankind to whom the dwelling-place under Midgard ( Middle Earth ) was given. After that, they made themselves a city in the middle of the world, which is known as Asgard. We call it Troy…In the city there is a seat called Hlidskialf, and when Odin sat in that throne he saw over all worlds and every man’s activity and understood everything he saw.” Humans build a city, Troy, which becomes the homeland of the gods (Aesir), who originally created heaven and earth, and the homeland of humans. The process of creation flows both ways: gods create for humans, and humans create for gods. Ontology is a Möbius strip: events recur even as orientations reverse. We find a close parallel in Ezra Pound’s Cantos : “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out; the bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan/City of patterned streets…” Here, a city built by human hands is intended to be a home for the gods. In another article in this collection , we connect this ancient Iranian city both to Cain’s city (above) and to the ‘patterned streets’ (circles) found in Dante’s Divine Comedy . Perhaps Pound also had Troy in mind…or should I say, Asgard? But back to the Prose Edda : “He (Odin) is the father of all the gods and of men, and of everything that has been brought into being by him and his power. The earth was his daughter and his wife. Out of her he begot the first of his sons…(wait for it)…Asa-Thor.” Ok, enough already! Our story began with Thor, grandson of the proto historical king of Troy, Priam. Eighteen generations later, Odin was born. Odin married Frigg and together they migrated to Scandinavia. Now we learn that this same Odin is ‘All-father’, the father of all gods and men, that Frigg, his daughter and his wife is really ‘earth’ and that the first of their sons is the very same Thor with whom our story began. Gimme a break! What are we to make of all these apparent contradictions? Absolutely nothing! There are no contradictions in mythology. (-A) ≠ -(A). The concept of contradiction arises in systems characterized by identity, quantity, causality, extension, duration, and logic, where the transitive and commutative properties rule. None of these concepts figures in any important way in mythological thinking. Myths are the first TOEs (Theories of Everything). Hawking meets Tolkien. Like Hawking, mythology searches for universal patterns; like Tolkien, it then struggles to communicate these patterns using the limited resources of language. You , dear reader, expect your patterns to be symmetrical, continuous, and orientable, but the world we’re modeling is not like that at all. It is stochastic, discrete, and non-orientable. You expect beginnings, middles, and ends, but such things do not exist on a Mobius Strip. You are expecting events situated in spacetime; mythology replaces spacetime with a hierarchy of fractals. Scale takes the place of extension. The order of events is immaterial, and ‘time loops’ are expected, perhaps even required, perhaps even universal. Mythic thinking has only one proper subject: ‘the pattern of patterns’. In spite of the important parallels with Judeo-Christian theology and Greek proto-history, the Norse cosmos is fabulously more complex. As we have already glimpsed, in addition to humans, there are many other humanoid races: frost giants (including trolls and, unexpectedly, wolves), light elves, dark elves ( aka dwarfs), and, of course, gods (Aesir). Each of these races has its own ‘homeland’, but there are other ‘uninhabited’ homelands as well: Muspell and Niflheim (above), Hel (the land of the dead), Val-hall (Valhalla, the home of fallen warriors), and Gimle (the resting place of the righteous): “…(Gimle) shall stand when both heaven and earth have passed away, and in that place shall live good and righteous people for ever and ever.” Astoundingly, all of these ‘homelands’ are connected by the trunk of a single ash tree, Yggdrasil , that has three principal roots: one in the realm of the Aesir (Asgard), one in the realm of the frost giants, and one in Niflheim. These roots, in turn, may be associated with the three Norns who weave the history of the universe (fate) from skeins of string (not heterotic string…as far as we know). We learn from Third that “Odin is the highest and most ancient of the Aesir. He rules all things…Odin is called ‘All-father’ for he is father of all gods. He is also called ‘Val-father’ (father of the slain)…Hanga-god (god of the hanged) and Hapta-god (god of prisoners), Farma-god (god of cargoes, possibly to be understood as human cargoes, i.e., travelers, or even slaves)…” One of the Aesir, “…Loki or Lopt, son of the giant Farbauti…is pleasing and handsome in appearance, evil in character, capricious in behavior…There was a giantess called Angraboda in Giantland. With her, Loki had three children. One was Fenriswolf, the second Lormungand (i.e. the Midgard serpent), the third is Hel. “And when the gods realized that these three siblings were being brought up in Giantland…All-father sent the gods to get the children and bring them to him. And when they came to him, he threw the serpent into that deep sea that lies around all lands, and this serpent grew so that it lies in the midst of the ocean encircling all lands and bites on its own tail. “Hel he threw into Niflheim…The Aesir brought up the wolf at home…” But as the wolf grew, the Aesir felt the need to tether it securely. So they went to the dwarves and asked them to make a bond that that wolf could not break…and they did! “It was made of six ingredients: the sound of the cat’s footfall and the woman’s beard; the mountain’s roots and the bear’s sinews; the fish’s breath and the bird’s spittle…” To prove this this story is true, we are told, “…You must have seen that a woman has no beard and there is no noise from a cat’s running, and there are no roots under a mountain…” Earlier attempts to fetter Fenriswolf all failed…because the tethers were made out of ordinary materials. No matter how strong they were at the outset, they were inevitably weakened by the wolf’s incessant struggles. They were ultimately subject to the law of entropy, and eventually, the wolf escaped them all. The dwarves’ “fetter was smooth and soft like a silken ribbon,” but it acted just like the strong force binding quarks in an atomic nucleus: “…When the wolf kicked, the band grew harder, and the harder he struggled, the tougher became the band.” This is a marvelous example of mythic reasoning. The text leads us to believe that a woman has no beard, for example, because the dwarfs used it to make Fenriswolf’s fetter. But there is another possible interpretation: What if the dwarfs made something (a fetter) out of nothing, out of things that do not exist (e.g. a woman’s beard)? ‘Something made out of nothing’ is, well, something else . The laws of physics would be suspended and entropy ‘need not apply’. My nine-year-old grandson said, “The fetter was made out of the opposite of everything.” Exactly so, and therefore it behaved in a way opposite to all other materials. A mythological model of anti-matter, perhaps. No bird's-eye view of the Norse cosmos would be complete without consideration of Ragnarök, aka the Apocalypse. Admit it, this is what you’ve been waiting for since you opened this post. So…back to the catechism, and just in the nick of time: Q: What information is there to be given about Ragnarok? A: There are many important things to be told about it. First of all, that a winter will come called fimbul (‘mighty’ or ‘mysterious’) winter. Then snow will drift from all directions. There will be great frosts and keen winds. The sun will do no good. There will be three of these winters together and no summer between. …The wolf will swallow the sun…the other wolf will swallow the moon…The stars will disappear from the sky…trees will become uprooted from the earth; mountains will fall; and all fetters and bonds will snap and break . Then Fenriswolf will get free…the Midgard serpent will fly into a great rage and make its way ashore…After that, Surt (a fire demon from the race of giants) will fling fire over the earth and burn the whole world. Q. What will happen then after heaven and earth and all the world is burned…will there be any kind of earth or sky? A: The earth will shoot up out of the sea and will be green and fair. Crops will grow unsown…And in a place called Hoddmimir’s holt, two people will lie hid during Surt’s fire called Life and Leifthrasir, and their food will be the dews of the morning. And from these people will be descended such a great progeny that all the world will be inhabited. And so ends the discourse on Norse cosmology…and now comes the really interesting and totally revolutionary part: “But the Aesir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him (Gyfli), and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there (in Sweden), so that when long periods of time had passed, men should not doubt that they were all the same , those Aesir about whom stories are told above and those who were now given the same names. “So someone there was given the name Thor…and to him are attributed the exploits that Thor (Hector) performed in Troy.” Wow! What else is there to say? Simply, wow! In Ulysses , James Joyce maps a day in the life of ordinary Dubliners onto events in Homer’s Odyssey . An incredible feat! But the Prose Edda goes much further. Sturluson begins by mapping Norse mythology onto both Jewish and Greek proto-histories. Then he maps Christian theology onto Norse mythology. Finally, he maps Norse mythology onto the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes and, for his piece de resistance , he maps the lives of ordinary, contemporary Swedes back onto events in Greek proto-history. To borrow a Judeo-Christian concept, everyone is ‘priest, prophet and king’. What Joyce (and Pound) demonstrated brilliantly, Snorri Sturluson had demonstrated with even greater power and complexity centuries earlier: the various ontological categories that populate human thought are really just different ways of experiencing and understanding the present lives of ordinary people. Everything that happens is happening right now! The past and the future only exist to serve the present and they exist only in the present. On the one hand, the Prose Edda is a literary triumph. But on the other hand, it is exactly what Mythology is all about. Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to Odin, he found them. Friedrich Wilhelm Heine. Yggdrasil, c. 1886. Illustration for Walhall: Die Götterwelt der Germanen by Felix and Therese Dahn. This illustration of Yggdrasil captures the essay’s core idea of mythology as an interconnected, multi-dimensional structure that links various realms—gods, humans, giants—and weaves together different times and layers of meaning, symbolizing the fractal, cyclical nature of mythic storytelling explored throughout the essay. 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 . Click the cover image to return to Holy Days 2024. Previous Next