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< Back Thank You for a Great First Year! David Cowles Jun 1, 2023 “In June 2022, we had 600 page views. 11 months later, that number has grown to more than 6,000 views per month.” Today, June 1, is the anniversary of the inaugural issue of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM); it is also the date for our first year 2 issue, our Summer Issue, released earlier today. Since June 1, 2022, we have published 8 issues of ATM, each one packed with feature length articles on philosophy, theology, culture (including science), and spirituality. In that same period we published c. 100 issues of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS), our shorter form bi-weekly blog. When we launched ATM last June, we hoped to grow 20% per month in our first year. In June 2022, we had 600 page views. In May 2023, 11 months later, that number has grown to more than 6,000 page views per month. That’s a 23% month-over-month growth rate; we more than met our goal – thanks to you! Needless to say, we have big plans for Year Two! We’re devoting the entire fall issue of ATM to artificial iIntelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications of this ground breaking technology, which some have called humanity’s greatest invention? Do you write? We’d love to consider an article from you for our Fall Issue. Check out our writers’ specs: Write! | Aletheia Today . We’ve recently opened ATM and TWS to both commercial and community service messaging. Check out our terms and rates: Advertise! | Aletheia Today Finally, we are hoping to enter the world of ecommerce later this year. We’re building our store now. Stay tuned for more details, but most importantly, keep reading! And thank you, thank you, thank you. 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 The Ease of Burden Erin Gruodis-Gimbel "Writing is not like Athena, springing fully formed from Zeus’ forehead. Writing is like all of Zeus’ other children, where he has to relate to someone for creation (and boy, does he relate). To create things, we need other people. It takes two to tango, two to make a child, and around 12 to make a sitcom." God lasted seven days without a writers’ room. Why would we subject the Writers Guild of America to the same thing? From Genesis 1:1 through 2:4, God is alone. Well, mostly alone; he has all the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. But on the eighth day, the world is barren, for “there was no one to till the ground.” So God does what any sensible deity would do — he gives himself some company. Of course, this company also has chores to do. Thus, God has created the first writers’ room. What a legacy. Many, many days later, the Writers Guild of America has gone on strike, essentially to prevent themselves from becoming chapter 1 of Genesis. Among the many issues the WGA is negotiating, two of the landmark ones are a minimum staffing requirement for writer’s rooms and thorough regulation of Artificial Intelligence for Guild projects. The Guild argues that minimum staff requirements are necessary for sustainable production and growth, and that AI in its present form represents an existential threat to the profession as it exists today. The AMPTP, the group of studios that produce the vast majority of the entertainment we see, has consistently responded with the legal equivalent of “neener neener,” which is very difficult to negotiate with. As a writer, I’m not particularly worried about AI. I’ve seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I have a healthy distrust of computers and outer space, but I’m not hysterical about it. So far, what we’ve seen has been a substandard aggregation of information, which is often incorrect, lacking nuance, skill, or voice. I’m not concerned. I also sometimes lack nuance, skill, and/or voice, but at least I can compensate by buying donuts for everyone. What I am worried about, in line with the Guild, is that the studios have become so enamored with the ease of AI that they get cartoon dollar signs in their eyes, and a cash register noise plays when they blink. What AI is — and it’s important to note that I’m talking about AI in its current, publicly accessible form — is an advanced aggregator. It scrapes every bit of data from the internet and constructs a relevant answer to the prompt. It amalgamates; it doesn’t create. As of now, most AI-generated content has been published in the digital media sphere and is notably riddled with factual errors. If media companies wanted to publish things that were incorrect, they might as well hire me to write about advances in particle physics. Another job I’ve lost to a computer. The worry is that the studios have such a low bar for the art they produce, lowering the bar even further by referring to it as “content,” so that an amalgamation, quickly, easily, and incorrectly produced by a computer, is preferable to the handpicked fruit of human labor. I guess if it comes down to it, using AI to write this article would actually be easier than doing it myself. In fact, in the course of getting this far, I have eaten a lot of very tiny tacos, spun around in my desk chair and gotten dizzy enough that I almost lost control of those very tiny tacos, read several theories on the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, delivered an impromptu TED Talk in my living room about the flaws in the AMPTP’s negotiation strategy, done the dishes, and engaged in some shoe shopping that I can absolutely not afford. Then I looked at the draft that I had, decided I didn’t like it at all, and started over. I called my dad, bounced some ideas off of him, texted two friends, bounced some ideas off of them, and now we’re here, together. I’m full of mini tacos (and a little queasy), and I hope you are also full and not queasy. What the studios hope to eliminate with those dollar signs in their eyes is exactly what I just did. Writing is very hard. Most of the time spent writing is not actually spent writing the thing you read. A lot of it is eating and doing the dishes. A lot of it is writing and then deleting, and then going through the document history and putting back what you deleted. And a lot of it, very notably, is talking to other people. The Bible is not just about God. It has God; it has quite a lot of Him. But only 35 verses of the first book of the Bible feature just God. He lasted seven days before he needed someone else. The key to creation, at least after the first week, is relationships. Writing is not like Athena, springing fully formed from Zeus’ forehead. Writing is like all of Zeus’ other children, where he has to relate to someone for creation (and boy, does he relate). To create things, we need other people. It takes two to tango, two to make a child, and around 12 to make a sitcom. AI supposedly simplifies that. It makes the process far easier than the previous model of having writers work alone. It takes the burden of creation — the picture of the tortured writer sitting alone, banging their head against the writer’s block and falling into a bottle of gin — and makes that process simpler, faster, kinder. More humane, ironically enough. AI relieves the wrong burden, though. The burden of creation is not sitting alone, banging your head against the writer’s block and falling into a bottle of gin. That happens sometimes, sure, although I think those individuals would probably be alcoholics anyway. Writers, especially those that fall under WGA representation for TV and screenwriting, rarely write alone. Even if the work is done alone, there are phone calls, workshops, writer’s groups, and traded PDFs over email. There are editors and beta readers and reluctant partners who would rather be doing something else. Working alone isn’t the burden of creation; working together is. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “hell is other people.” Clearly, he was observing my Intro to Playwriting class. Working collaboratively is hard. That’s the real burden. Sometimes, collaboration looks less like writing and more like a cattle auction. But there’s a reason that TV has writers’ rooms, screenwriters often have partners, playwrights like me have working groups and workshop cohorts. Other people may be hell, but they are also key to creation, whether it means working on one thing together or the constant revising that comes with feedback. The first play that I ever wrote was seven pages long. Over a year before I would even consider myself a writer, I was texting with a friend, and we created the character of an old man who refused to die. A hitman showed up at his home, and he simply said, “no thank you,” and went about his day. I told my friend to give me 20 minutes, and I came back with a 7-page play called Shel and Lenny. I wrote that play alone, but I didn’t create it alone. For other plays, I created them alone, but I had directors, actors, dramaturgs, sometimes just people passing by, who helped, who shaped them, who annoyed me so much with their feedback that I eventually made the play even better just to shut them up. Even when I am alone at my desk, I have partners. Even when I am alone in my room, I have a writers’ room, although it’s sometimes better known as cold-calling my friends and leaving very long voicemails. Multiple voices, multiple perspectives, multiple stories, make work better. When you have unchecked inspiration from one person, you get a poor man’s version of David Foster Wallace. No one wants that. Not even David Foster Wallace (RIP). For balance, for growth, for the sustainability of the profession, there have to be writers’ rooms. Some rare writers may work fully alone; I commend them and do not want to be like them. Writing is listening and disagreeing. Writing is compromise. Writing is translation of one idea into another voice. Writing is connection. After all, if we’re going to connect with our audiences, don’t we have to connect with each other? If we want that connection — something most of us desire, though perhaps not the studios — you need many writers. Multiple people are expensive, hard to wrangle, and nearly impossible to get a cohesive lunch order for. It’s a burden, an expense, and time lost. But without that burden, we don’t work. Without that burden of creation, the inspiration that comes when you’re arguing, the realizations that come when you’re critiquing feedback… without those, writing doesn’t happen. The studios think that’s a burden that needs to be lifted, and they believe AI will do it for us. All that pesky relating to each other and collaborating can be eliminated with a computer that spits out a substandard facsimile of what you and eleven other writers would have come up with. They want AI to take us to the Genesis 1:1 version of writing — a solitary writer drinking themselves to death in an attic in front of ChatGPT. This is preferable, they want to tell us. Look at how little work you have to do! You don’t need those noisy rooms; you don’t need those arguments; you don’t need to talk to anyone else. We’ve freed you from your burden of creation, see? By lifting this burden of creation, it brings us back to a model that is and has always been barren. No one truly works alone. Even when Henry David Thoreau claimed he was all by his lonesome on Walden Pond, his mother was dropping by every Thursday to do his laundry. Writing isn’t easy. I spent an hour and a half on the phone trying to figure this out, not to mention the time I spent avoiding both the phone call and the writing. But no one does this because it’s easy. We do it because we have stories to tell; because if we didn’t do it, we’d feel some sort of metaphysical constipation. There are no spiritual laxatives that can fix that. We do it because it’s hard; because the struggle is worth it; because the struggle is a perverse kind of fun. But just because writing isn’t easy doesn’t mean that's a problem to be fixed. Nowadays, there's a compulsion for everything to be convenient. Some things are difficult. Some things take time. Some things are worth the effort. We don’t need to automate the writing process to make it easier, taking the act of creation away from the individual. Not all burdens have to be eased; sometimes they just have to be shared. God needed someone to till the field, and I need someone to tell me that we can’t have half the stage on fire for the second act, no matter how much I want it. The studios should be grateful that the need for collaboration is what I’m taking from the Bible, and not what Jesus said about rich men seeing Heaven. Erin Gruodis-Gimbel is a playwright, author, and fact-checker based in New York. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. You can find her writing at Beyond Belief, JAKE the Mag, COPY, and on post-it notes and legal pads scattered around her like a semi-intellectual aura. You can find her at eringruodisgimbel.com and erinxgg on Twitter. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back The Jesus Stories David Cowles Sep 5, 2024 “Mark wrote for Galilee, Matthew for Jerusalem, Luke for Antioch. But it is the Gospel of John that will accompany Bach into space…” “May you live in interesting times!” Ok, how about c. 30 CE? Interesting enough for you? Rome’s military, political, economic and cultural power is at its peak. And yet there is pervasive spiritual malaise across the Mediterranean basin. Traditional religion, in the form of Greco-Roman mythology and pre-exilic Judaism, is losing its appeal and, more importantly, its heuristic power. Thought leaders are looking far afield to satisfy their spiritual longing and their philosophical curiosity. Stoicism, gnostic mystery cults, fundamentalist sects, and revolutionary political cells are surging. It’s a great time to be an ‘ideological entrepreneur’…or not! Yes, the ground was fertile, but getting heard over the cacophony of ‘new ideas’ was daunting – a bit like today’s internet. And did I mention Rome? Ruthlessly sniffing out every whisper of dissent! Nevertheless, many of the new movements left a mark on civilianization; but one, obviously, triumphed over the rest, and over the forces of political and religious reaction. I am referring, of course, to Christianity. Sometimes things just happen to work out. Call it serendipity, call it grace, call it the will of God. Sometimes things come together and so it was with the early Christian Church. After 33 CE, versions of the Jesus Story began popping up from Alexandria to Antioch. Four of these versions, however, became ‘canonical’. We know them, of course, as the four Gospels found today in the New Testament. The first of these was Mark . Short, earthy, it reads like a journalist’s real time account of contemporary events. It was written specifically for the benefit of the early church. As such it was a bit abbreviated, sectarian, and partisan. Had our knowledge of Jesus been limited to Mark , the movement might not have survived. Fortunately for all of us, three other versions of the Jesus Story appeared, aimed at other, broader audiences. Begin with Matthew , because it begins with Mark . 90% of the Markan content is reprised in the much longer version attributed to Matthew. Matthew wraps Mark with infancy narratives and excerpts from the oral tradition of Jesus’ Sayings, known by scholars as “Q”. Like a successful 21st century political movement, having won the ‘nomination’ so to speak, it was now necessary to ‘move to the middle’, to ‘appeal to the moderates’. Matthew steps into that space! It is written to appeal to the non-Christian Jews throughout Judea and the diaspora. Job One, therefore, is to ‘prove’ that Jesus is indeed the Messiah long awaited by Israel and to demonstrate how events in the life of Jesus ‘fulfill’ Messianic prophesies found in the Old Testament. From Matthew’s perspective, every Jew is potentially a proto-Christian. Not to be outdone, Luke does the same, but for an entirely different audience. A disciple of Paul, Luke is at pains to show how the teachings of Jesus fulfill the spiritual longing no longer adequately met by Greco-Roman mythology. Matthew and Luke give us the twin pillars of Christianity. Together, they point the Mediterranean’s two great spiritualities toward a common vanishing point (i.e. Jesus). And then there’s John ! Mark wrote for the here and now, Matthew and Luke for their respective constituencies and traditions; John wrote for the ages! Mark wrote for Galilee, Matthew for Jerusalem, Luke for Antioch. But it is the Gospel of John that will accompany Bach into space in a time capsule meant to acquaint extra-terrestrial civilizations with the highest achievements of homo sapiens . It is unclear whether John had even read any of the other (‘synoptic’) Gospels. His biographical material re Jesus seems to come from an independent source (was he an eyewitness?). He weaves that material into a poetic presentation of the Cosmic Christ that reprises the best of Homer and Milton. 2,000 years later, no one has made any advance on John and it’s not clear that anyone ever will. One can find John in Handel’s Messiah , in Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and in the work of the other four evangelists: John, Paul, George, and Ringo ! 20th century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, said that Western philosophy consists of a series of footnotes to Plato’s Timaeus . In that same spirit, I would suggest that Western theology consists of footnotes to the Gospel of John . Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 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. 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< Back Nature, Nurture, or Bacteria David Cowles May 23, 2025 “Without them (bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea), we wouldn’t be who we are.” For decades, scientists have debated the issue: Are we who we are because of our Nature (e.g. DNA) or because of our Nurture (e.g. upbringing, life experiences)? Both sides have their points. Now it turns out there’s a third player, a variable that includes none of our DNA and is only very indirectly impacted by our parents’ pedagogical choices: the independent micro-organisms that inhabit our ‘gut’. To whatever extent we buy into this new thesis, we accept the notion that we are Zombies, that our apparently intentional acts are at least influenced, if not controlled, by organisms that are biologically unrelated to us. Our biomes consist of independent organisms that ‘choose’to live symbiotically in our stomachs and intestines. Defendants in criminal cases now have a new defense. In addition to… ➢ “My genes made me do it,” ➢ “My childhood made me do it,” ➢ “Alcohol made me do it (I was overserved),” or ➢ “The devil made me do it,” I can now rely on something new: “My biome made me bad!” This argument may be the most persuasive yet. I have to deal with my genetic inheritance and my childhood traumas in everything I do. I can choose to get drunk…or not, and the court may not believe in the power of Satan. But who can deny compulsion from an independent, outside source? For example, if someone put a gun to my head and said, “Mug this man!” I would probably not be held liable for my actions, assuming the threat to my safety was real and imminent. I am acting under the orders of another and disobeying those orders would put my life in jeopardy. How much more so if the ‘gunman’ consists of trillions of invisible microbes occupying space within my body and continuously exchanging ‘information’ (instructions), i.e. electrical and chemical signals, with that body! As kids we fantasized that we were inert action figures being manipulated by a more advanced race of ‘children’ living in dimensions imperceptible to mere mortals. We were like characters in The Lego Movie , where the choices and actions that seemed so real to Emmet were actually the choices and actions of Finn, a 10 year old boy living in a dimensional reality unknown to our hero. “They directly affect your nervous system, shaping your mood…the trillions of microbial residents in your gut (bacteria, viruses, fungi, and archaea) also communicate with your brain. Without them, we wouldn’t be who we are.” - Manasee Wagh, Popular Mechanics (5/16/2025) This last sentence, seemingly innocuous, has profound philosophical implications. “Without them, we wouldn’t be who we are.” “Who R U?” - Alice in Wonderland . You are not your genes, you are not your life experiences, you are not what you eat (or drink), you are not Lucifer’s lackey…and you are not your biome. Who are you then? According to Buckminster Fuller, you are a verb. According to Alfred North Whitehead, you are process. According to Jean-Paul Sartre, you are neant (nothing). They are all on to something but, bad news, none of them will get you acquitted of first degree murder. We live in a world where we are surrounded by ‘existents’: sugar and spice, snails and tails, terra firma below, firmament above. But we are none of these things, Neti Neti (‘not this, not that’). We are the negation of what is ( neant ), the transformation ( verb ) of what was, the becoming ( process ) of what will be. Since we are nothing that has ever been, is now, or ever will be, we are truly nothing (neant): “My name is Nemo” ( Odyssey , Book 9)… and that’s a good thing. Because I am ‘nothing’, I can be anything. In the context of what I have inherited, I can be whatever I choose to be. (I can’t be a pro basketball player because I inherited a 5’ 9” frame and a pot belly…but I can be anything else!) There are guardrails but within those boundaries I can do and be absolutely anything I want to do or be. My motto is ‘Don’t dream it, be it!’ ( Rocky Horror Picture Show ); but once you are it, realize that you are not it . I am free. More than that, I am ‘freedom’ itself. Freedom is ‘my nature’ and my ‘freedom’ is the total absence of any nature. It is through me (and every other ‘me’) that freedom enters the World. I am the negation ( neant ) of what is, I am the transformation ( verb ) of what was, and I am the becoming ( process ) of what will be. I am who I was at birth (or before), I am who I will be at death (or after), and I am who I was every moment along the way. Like Parmenides’ Aletheia , “…ungenerated and imperishable, whole…complete…all together, one, continuous… ” I am the immobile pivot at the center of a perpetually turning wheel (‘The Great Mandala’). So I am not my DNA, or my life experiences, or my biome. Each of these is important but only as part of the guardrails. They leave my essence, my freedom, unscathed. They are not who I am…because my name is Nemo ! *** Fernand Léger’s The City (1919) is a large, vibrant canvas that captures the dynamism and complexity of urban life just after World War I. Using bold blocks of color, overlapping geometric forms, and fragments of signs and machinery, Léger evokes the rhythm of crowded streets, modern architecture, and industrial growth. The painting celebrates the interconnected energy of a bustling metropolis, where people, technology, and movement form a single, pulsing organism. 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.

Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? < Back I Wasn't Anything David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? When my world was still magical (ages 6 through 11?), Halloween was the most important day of the year. Thanksgiving and Christmas were great fun, and we benefited handsomely from each, but Halloween was our holiday. We got to make our own fun! Plus, it was the only night of the year when we were allowed out after dark, with friends, and, in those days, without any adult supervision. By the time I was eight years old, Halloween season stretched from October 1 through November 2 (All Souls' Day in the Roman Catholic Church and the day the candy ran out in our house). There was no time to spare. The logistics were daunting. Who’s in my wolf pack this year (for Trick-or-Treating)? What streets will we hit and in what order? And, most importantly, what will we be ? Now I am a grandfather 10 times over, and one day I made the mistake (sadly, one of many) of saying to a grandson, “I hear you’re dressing up as Captain America this year.” Crestfallen, he managed, “No Grandpa, I am Captain America.” I had forgotten! Choosing our Halloween ‘character’ (‘avatar’ today) was not a matter of putting on a costume for a few hours or experimenting with an alternate identity for a day. It was more like choosing, or being chosen by, a totem animal. Your Halloween character is ‘who you are’…until the next Halloween rolls around. “Who should I be?” That is the question! “And how should I be it?” Store-bought costumes are sleek and shiny, but they are usually made from some sort of plastic material that makes noise when you walk and has a faint chemical odor. A home-made costume, on the other hand, could be much better…or much worse. It affords more room for novelty, but that is tricky. How ‘novel’ do you want to be at eight years old? Plus, you’ll need Mom’s help, and that means surrendering some creative control. You’re eight; you’re not used to making life or death identity-determining decisions, and this is the most important decision you’ve made in a year; and it will be another year before you have a chance to do it again. There is no margin for error. And yet, I erred. The decision was of such monumental significance that I simply couldn’t pull the trigger; I procrastinated. Sure enough, Halloween morning came, and I was still not settled. Over breakfast, Mom nudged, “Do you know what you’re going to be yet?” And again, after school. Finally, around 4 o’clock I turned to her in desperation, “Mom, what can I be?” “Well, you could be a mummy. I could wrap toilet paper all over you and tape it.” I wasn’t happy, but it was too late to be anything else. “Mummy me up please, Mommy!” It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as you’re imagining. In fact, it was ‘kinda good.’ I hit the streets in high spirits, and everything would have turned out ok, except for one thing: after about an hour, it started to rain, not hard enough to disrupt our mission but enough to soak us to the skin. I’ll let you put two and two together. Suffice to say, I returned home at the end of the evening, a rain-drenched child with wet toilet paper hanging all over him. I couldn’t hold back my tears, “Mommy, I wasn’t anything!” I didn’t get over this disappointment quickly, and it was many years before I appreciated the momentous lesson of these events. The words still ring in my ears today, “I wasn’t anything!” and that realization, that experience ended up forming the cornerstone of my later adult thinking. (Freudians welcome!) “I wasn’t anything!” Of course, I wasn’t. I wasn’t anything on Halloween night; I wasn’t anything six months later, and I’m still not anything today. Neither are you, neither is anyone. The day I become something , is the day I no longer am . But it goes even deeper. What I am is precisely that I am not anything. Neti, neti – not this, not that! For human beings, being is a matter of not being what we’re not. Is this surprising? How could it be otherwise? If I truly was Captain America, then I wouldn’t be me, would I? And if I am me, how can I be anything else? I am neither Captain America, nor a Pirate, nor a Mummy. Neither am I an eight-year-old boy…nor an 80-year-old man! I am what nothing is and what nothing is. So… So…everything! On the one hand, I don’t have to waste time “finding myself” because there is quite literally nothing to find. But that reprieve comes at a great price. I am nothing, but I am nothing in the context of the world. In myself, I can be nothing, but I cannot be nothing in the world. If I were, then I wouldn’t be in the world at all, would I? So, it’s back to Halloween night after all. Because I am nothing, I am free to make myself anything I choose. My identity is not dictated by my genes, by my socioeconomic class (sorry Karl), by my upbringing, or by my education. “I know who I am, and I know that I can be whatever I want to be.” But with such freedom comes an awesome responsibility. I don’t have the luxury of living life on the sidelines. I cannot pass through life as a spectator. I see the world as it is, and I must decide who I wish to be in this world. I might choose to be a recluse, but that, too, is a choice, and being a recluse is still being something vis a vis the world. At eight years of age, there are three sentences that you long to hear:  “Daddy’s bringing home a puppy (or a pony).  “School’s out…forever.”  “Every day is Halloween.” Well, I never got a pony or a dog (strike one), and I did get a college education (strike two), but, good news, every day is Halloween. Home run! Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? 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 Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back The Road Taken David Cowles Mar 12, 2024 “We don’t have many worlds; we have one world with incredibly many facets and one such facet is our ‘road taken’.” Robert Frost’s most famous poem ( The Road Not Taken ) owes its popularity, in part, to its universality: I mean, who has not stood at a crossroads, literally or figuratively, and wondered, “Which path should I take?” 100 times a day every day! Arguably, choice is the paradigmatic human experience. Bewilderment is the essence of who we are. Frost knows where he is and where he’s going; but he has reached a fork in the road. Two paths lie before him, both going to the same destination. He can’t change where he is, and his destination is predetermined; but everything along the way is up for grabs. ‘Along the way’ – that’s what we call ‘life’, isn’t it? We are en transit . Yes…but not so fast. It’s what most of us call ‘life’; but that’s by no means set in stone. Today, we are all about the journey; we read the Odyssey . In times past, folks were more into origins and destinies. They read the Iliad . IRL? Your status at birth used to be the principal determinant of your identity and value. First born son or third born daughter? Under the sheets…or atop them? Noble or peasant? Bourgeoise or proletarian? College Course or Industrial Arts? Fortunately, less so today. Or your status at death! Fame, legacy, progeny. “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.” (Shelley) “He who has the most toys wins.” (My parents’ generation) Plus, the fate of your immortal soul was not settled until your final breath. “…At the hour of our death, Amen.” ( Ave Maria ) Only then could St. Peter label you sheep or goat, grain or chaff. Everything was about the finale. All of this seems rather strange to us today. Now, we regard birth ( Alpha ) as a lottery and death ( Omega ) as the inevitable outcome of playing Russian Roulette. An aficionado of the Ancien Regime might chime in, “Yes, but in those days the path from Alpha to Omega was less eventful, more of a straight line, varying little from trip to trip or from traveler to traveler. The journey didn’t matter so much; it was more noise than information, more obstacle than path; it was just a means to an end”: A ↓ Ω A friend once captured this spirit in me: “For you, a car is just a means of transportation.” Exactly! Call me old school. My trips derive their meaning and value from their launch (purpose) and their landing (result). Everything on the way, the way itself, is wandering. Robert Frost offers a different, but still simple, alternative: A ↙ ↘ x x’ ↘ ↙ Ω “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Origin and destiny are hardwired. It’s the chosen path that is undetermined, that generates information. We cannot change our A or our Ω, but we can control, or at least influence, everything in between. That’s called agency , or free will . You bristle! “What do you mean, my origin and destiny are hardwired? And how can you say my freedom consists of nothing more than the choice between two pre-set paths? What kind of freedom is that?” Fair points! But it’s the ‘free’ kind of freedom…by which I mean, it’s all there is, it’s all there ever could be. How so? First, every choice, no matter how broad, can ultimately be reduced to a finite number of binary choices. Frost’s poem models just one such choice; other decisions could involve hundreds of binary choices. In any event, each binary choice is one quantum of freedom. Second, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done!” (Beatles) Here we need an assist from Sartre: I am always totally free! I can order any flavor of ice cream I want at Baskin-Robbins; or I can decide to forgo ice cream altogether. But I cannot order a muffaletta sandwich, “Sir, we’d like to accommodate you, but we don’t have the ingredients.” I can only do things that are physically possible. In the context of Frost’s poem I cannot hack my way through the underbrush with my pocket knife. Freedom ultimately comes down to a finite number of choices between possibles. Finally, my origin is hardwired; I have to start from somewhere. So is my destination but this is trickier. Those of you born before 1990 might remember a contraption called a ‘pinball machine’. The origin is a compressed spring, the destination is a hole at the bottom of the ‘field’, but the route from origin to destination is infinitely variable. It is the ‘topology’ or ‘tilt’ that makes the outcome inevitable but how you get from A to Ω, how long it takes to get there, and how many points you rack up along the way are totally undetermined. You are 100% free…within the physical limits imposed by the underlying structure. Ditto real life! Because a World exists (Descartes), we know that that World must be infinitesimally biased toward certain outcomes, i.e. faintly conditioned by Values known collectively as ‘the Good’. (Aquinas et al.) In infinite time, the outcome is inevitable; in finite time we are free to keep playing, and adding points, for as long as we are ready, willing, and able. Christian theology provides a similar model. The Parousia , the 2 nd Coming of Christ, is inevitable…but the date and form of that Coming is entirely contingent on the freely determined course of events. All trajectories originate at a common point (Creation, Big Bang) and ultimately converge at a singularity (The Kingdom of Heaven), but the trajectories themselves are otherwise unconditioned and entirely self-determined. Absolute freedom does exist, as an essential quality or value, but it exists physically only in the context of a given concrete structure. Physically, freedom can be absolute but only with some given mise-en-scene . IRL, there are usually a great many intermediate steps between A and Ω and it may well be that there are more than 2 alternative paths converging on each node. Choice along the way is what gives life spice, variety and intensity. Perhaps, however, we can treat Frost’s ‘diamond’ as a web of quantum processes . It may be that the incredibly complex web of options and choices that form the infrastructure of life can be broken down into Frost Quanta . So, it might be useful to see how Frost’s model evolves in slightly more complex situations. This is nowhere near robust enough to mimic real life, but it may help us conceptualize what such a model might look like. Consider the following: A ↙ ↘ x x ↙ ↘ ↙ ↘ x x x ↙ ↘ ↙ ↘ ↙ ↘ x x x x ↘ ↙ ↘ ↙ ↘ ↙ x x x ↘ ↙ ↘ ↙ x x ↘ ↙ Ω Every node (actual entity, event) is an inflection point. In fact, a node is defined as any point at which two or more paths converge and/or diverge. This is not a Many Worlds Theory! Sue and Sam may begin their journeys with flights from Boston to two different connecting cities, but they will meet again in Seattle and there is nothing to preclude their meeting up for a cocktail at a common hub along the way. In this model, as IRL, chains of events converge as well as diverge. For that reason, we don’t have many worlds (Hugh Everett); we have one world with incredibly many facets and one such facet is our ‘road taken’. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Again Elizabeth Bradfield Already, you don’t know what has passed, or when, precisely, it started. The sky has been shifting into something red for over an hour, and you’ve been blinking, taking a sip from a glass, turning a page of your book, daydreaming. The moment is close. The light is condensing into a smear of orange along the horizon, and then something happens—bee trapped inside the window, crash from the kitchen— and you’ve missed it. When I was small, my father once had me race up a long flight of unsteady, wooden stairs yelling run at my heels. Go . Faster, or you’ll miss it. And at the top of the stairs, we watched it again, the sunset. And that changed everything. He was thinking of math, the earth’s curvature and the great trick of altitude. He was thinking that he’d like to see again the sun slip into that particular evening’s end. And why shouldn’t he? Pointing off across the bay, out of breath, he lifted me to stand on the shaky rail where I swayed above a steep fall of blackberries, bees humming around the fruit as if they were in orbit around dark, clustered suns, thinking the sun couldn’t know what we’d just gotten away with. I knew it wasn’t magic, that time can’t be fooled. My legs burned from the run. I knew it was just quickness. Light. The relative pace of things. Our willingness to find ourselves out of breath above a humming decline of pollen. The sunset twice in one night, leading me to all this longing. This was republished without edits and with permission from Interpretive Work by Elizabeth Bradfield (2008, Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.) Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five collections, most recently Toward Antarctica and Theorem , a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. She has co-edited the anthologies Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration and Cascadia: A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology and Poetry (forthcoming 2023). Her work has been appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship . Founder of Broadsided Press ( www.broadsidedpress.org ), Liz works as a naturalist/guide and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University. www.ebradfield.com Previous Next

< Back Mark’s Diary – Notes for a Screenplay David Cowles “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.” Narrator : (Quoting Isaiah) “Here is my messenger whom I send ahead, a voice crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare a way for the Lord; make straight his path’.” Direction : As the Narrator is reciting Isaiah, the words are captioned in white letters across a black screen. Scene #1: John is baptizing pilgrims in the waters of the River Jordan. Jesus approaches and is baptized. Chorus (of 3): “This is my beloved son on whom my favor rests.” Scene #2: Jesus is praying alone in the wilderness, wrestling with the temptations of Satan. Learning that John has been arrested, he enters Galilee, proclaiming the Good News to everyone, everywhere. Jesus : “The kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and believe the good news.” Scene #3: As he walks along the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus recruits his first apostles, Simon (Peter), Andrew, James, and John, fishermen and merchants from the local bourgeoisie. Jesus : “Come, I will make you fishers of men.” Scene #4: On the Sabbath, Jesus enters the synagogue at Capernaum, the major city in the region, and teaches the rapt congregation with authority. (We don’t hear the specifics of the teaching.) As he is speaking, an obviously troubled man interrupts and exposes Jesus’ identity: Chorus : “I know who you are, holy one of God.” Jesus : “Silence! …Come out of him!” Direction : Jesus is piqued at the interruption and at the untimely disclosure and, knowing it to be the work of demons, Jesus cures the man just to silence him, but it’s too late. He’s created a stir! It’s early days but already, things are not going as smoothly as expected. Scene #5: Jesus takes refuge in Simon’s house where he heals Simon’s mother-in-law as well as others from the town. Before dawn, Jesus slips out, hoping to pray alone, but Simon et al. soon follow. Scene #6: Now Jesus and his tiny band roam the hills of Galilee, sticking mainly to byways and speaking only in rural villages. Along the way, Jesus meets and cures a leper, and swears him to silence. Jesus : “Show yourself only to the priest.” Narrator : “But the man went out and made the whole story public, until Jesus could no longer show himself in any town. He was forced to remain in deserted places, but the people continued to come.” Direction : The Gospel of Mark includes numerous instances of Jesus performing miracles, usually swearing his beneficiaries to silence that they often break. We have staged a few of these miracles but the Director should feel free to stage additional miracle stories from the Gospel as she sees fit. Scene #7: Jesus and his disciples are walking through a corn field; it happens to be the Sabbath. The scene suggests Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows . The apostles are picking, peeling and eating ears of corn. Chorus : “Why do they do what is forbidden on the Sabbath?” Jesus : “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. The Son of Man is sovereign, even over the Sabbath.” Narrator : “So the Pharisees began plotting against him with the partisans of King Herod to see how they could do away with him…Then Jesus went up into the hill country and called the men he wanted, and they joined him. In all, he appointed 12 to be his companions.” Scene #8: As Jesus and his followers continued on their way, Jesus takes the opportunity to teach: Jesus : “Nothing is hidden unless it is to be disclosed, the measure you give is the measure you will receive…and more besides. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed , the smallest of all seeds…Once sown, it grows taller than any other plant and forms branches so large that birds can settle in its shade.” Scene #9, Narrator : “Once more, a crowd has gathered around Jesus so that he’s had no chance to eat. His family set out to take charge of him for people were saying that Jesus was out of his mind. When his mother and his brothers arrive, they remain outside and send a message into Jesus.” Chorus : “Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” Direction : Jesus is mortified at being summoned home for supper as if he were a little child. Angry, he looks for an opportunity to regain lost dignity. Jesus : “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?... Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother.” Direction: But the damage has been done. Chorus : “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? Are not his sisters here with us? Narrator: “So he could no longer work miracles there…he was taken aback by their lack of faith.” Jesus : Let’s cross over to the other side of the lake. Direction : Here for the first time a map of the region appears on the screen. As the film continues, the map reappears and Jesus’ movements are tracked. Map : Jesus travels across the Sea of Galilee from Bethsaida on the northern shore to the Decapolis, a group of 10 Greek speaking towns on the Southeastern shore. Scene #10, Narrator : “As Jesus stepped ashore, a man possessed by demons, who cut himself with stones, came up to him.” Jesus : “Come out of this man!” Narrator : “Now there happened to be a large herd of pigs nearby. The demons went into the pigs and the herd rushed over the cliff, into the lake, and drowned, and the spectators begged Jesus to leave the area.” Scene #11, Narrator : “So Jesus crossed back over to Gailee. Upon his arrival, Jairus, the leader of a local synagogue, approached him.” Jarius : “My little daughter is at death’s door. I beg you, ‘Come, lay hands on her, cure her, save her life’.” Jesus sets out but midway, messengers arrive. Chorus : “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Rabbi further?” Jesus : “Do not be afraid. Only have faith.” Narrator : “He allowed only Peter, James and John to accompany him to the leader’s house where there was a great commotion with loud crying and wailing.” Jesus : “Why this wailing? The child is not dead, she is asleep.” (Chorus laughs derisively.) “Get up my child,” and she rises. Scene #12, Narrator : “They set off secretly by boat, searching for an isolated place. But when he came ashore, Jesus saw a great crowd.” Chorus : “This is a lonely place, and it is getting very late. Send the people off to the farms and villages to buy themselves something to eat.” Jesus : “Give them something to eat yourselves. How many loaves have you?” Chorus : “Five loaves, and two fish as well.” Narrator : “Jesus took the five loaves, looked up to heaven, said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to the disciples to distribute. He also divided up the fish. Those who ate numbered 5,000 and they ate to their hearts’ content. 12 large baskets full of scraps were gathered up at the end. “Then Jesus left this place and went to the territory of Tyre.” Map : Jesus route to Lebanon (Tyre), 50 miles northeast, a 3 day journey at that time. “He found a house to stay in and would have liked to remain there unrecognized, but that was impossible. On his return, he went by way of Sidon and the Decapolis to the Sea of Galilee…” Map : Jesus’ route through Lebanon, Syria and Jordan is incredibly circuitous. He ends up back at the Sea of Galilee but now he is back on the Eastern Shore. Emphasis should be placed on how much distance Jesus keeps between himself and his native Galilee. Scene #13, Narrator : “…There Jesus fed another 4,000 pilgrims with 7 loaves and several fish; this time 7 baskets of scraps were collected.” Direction : The disciples are murmuring among themselves. They appear bewildered. Jesus : “Do you still not understand? Are your minds closed? When I broke the 5 loaves among the 5000, how many baskets full of scraps did you gather?” Chorus : “Twelve.” Direction : Here the map can morph or flip into a blackboard/whiteboard. As the Narrator speaks, the following image gradually appears on the screen: ‘5 loaves/5000 people →12 baskets’ Jesus : “And how many when I broke the 7 loaves among the 4,000? Chorus : “Seven.” ‘7 loaves/4000 people → 7 baskets’ Jesus (exasperated): “Do you still not understand?” Direction: Tensions are clearly on the rise. Jesus is testy, the disciples are squabbling among themselves, and everyone is growing restless. Chorus : “We have left everything to become your followers.” Jesus : “There is no one who has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother, father, children or land for my sake who will not receive 100 times as much… and eternal life.” Direction: But like Washington at Valley Forge, Jesus realizes he can wait no longer. He must act…or risk losing his followers. It’s now…or never! Jesus : “Now we are going to Jerusalem where the Son of Man will be given up to the chief priests and the doctors of the law. They will condemn him to death and hand him over to the occupiers. He will be mocked, spat upon, flogged and killed; but three days later, he will rise again!” Narrator: “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.” Director’s Note: This scene should be staged to suggest Kerouac’s On the Road , Ken Kesey’s ‘Merry Pranksters’, etc. As they proceed, crosses may barely be seen punctuating the far distant skyline. Curtain David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com Return to Table of Contents Previous Next

“The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.” < Back Particularity David Cowles Jan 15, 2023 “The first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed.” From the earliest times, human beings have wondered about the world around them. Perhaps fascination with the motion of heavenly bodies is what kicked us off. Here was an almost impossibly diverse set of phenomena that could be studied safely and dispassionately from the mouth of one’s cave. The cosmic dance has all the elements necessary for ‘scientific’ inquiry: the relatively fixed background (stars) serves as a measuring device, the periodic motion of sun, moon and planets constitutes a clock. In this context we can identify, measure and now sometimes even predict ‘one-off events’ such as meteor showers and comet fly-bys. Even better, the heavens can be studied without any appreciable interaction between observer and observed. It is a paradigm for ‘objective inquiry’. Human beings are funny; we crave objectivity but when we find it, we are terrified. A world that engages with us is dangerous, but not nearly as frightening as a world that doesn’t. Whispers in the corner rarely betoken good . Today we are baffled by the interactivity of observer and observed in quantum mechanics, but interactivity is the nature of things. What’s truly baffling is the motions of bodies that can be painstakingly recorded but that we cannot impact in any way and that do not appear to impact us. This situation is intolerable. Impotence is more terrifying than engagement. Engagement, even in situations of extreme danger, gives us a measure of, or at least the illusion of, control. I’d rather wrestle with a lion than listen to its ominous roar in the night. It is said that nature abhors a vacuum; so do we! And is there a better model of ‘vacuum’ than ‘outer space’? So, the first known application of Occam’s Razor occurred 50,000 years ago, not in 14th century England as is generally supposed. Nature could not be so wasteful as to perform this incredible cosmic dance each night with no effect. It must have a purpose, that purpose must include us as an end, and therefore the ‘motion of the heavens’ must impact our terrestrial lives in some perceptible and significant way. Et voilà , proto-astronomy becomes astrology! Simultaneously, we humans were presumably becoming conscious of our identity as somehow distinct from the physical world around us. As before, the disconnect was intolerable. Et voilà encore , astrology becomes mythology! There must be a layer of ‘intentional being’ that mediates our interaction with our environment. What better solution than the gods ! These entities have a foot in both worlds. They are part human, part ‘nature’: they are humanesque representations of natural processes (e.g., Poseidon and the Sea). The pagan pantheon is ready-made to explain our interaction with our world. Could our intellectual history have evolved differently? Probably not. It was not until the 20th century CE that anyone fully explored the implications of the alternative, i.e., that we confront ‘the external world’ directly, without the cloud cover of Mount Olympus. It was not pretty, but Jean-Paul Sartre chronicled that experience in his aptly named 1938 novel, Nausea . To summarize, the experience was unbearable and the situation intolerable. We need ‘the gods’ if we are to stay sane. What’s the use of ‘mediating gods’ unless those gods give us some influence over the world they mediate? Influence, not control. If we could control the world, we wouldn’t need the gods, or if we did, they would be like the knobs that we pull to get a candy bar out of a hospital vending machine at 2 in the morning. Instead, we influence the gods, and the gods in turn influence events in our world. But how does one go about influencing the gods? Today we might pray, but this would have been much too ‘cerebral’ for our ancestors. They had no concept of a purely mental event. If the gods were to be propitiated, it must be via a physical process. There was, as yet, no concept of benevolence , so we must be willing to give if we hope to get. How much do you want a good hunting/gathering season? How much are you willing to give to get it? A pile of gathered nuts? A freshly killed antelope? Or your firstborn child? Gradually, the interaction of human beings with spirits became regularized as ritual. Liturgy is technology , and reliance on technology assumes some degree of regularity in the external world; and so ritual morphed into proto-science and proto-theology. Overtime, our understanding of the external world deepened and ultimately science, theology, and philosophy emerged as distinct, albeit related and overlapping, methods of inquiry and avenues of discovery. Once we liberated the genie from its lamp, ‘knowledge’ exploded along all three axes; but it didn’t change its basic character. It was and still is a road map through the minefields of life. In much of the world, monotheism replaced polytheism, logic replaced speculation, and experiment replaced observation. But still the basic premise: the world must be ‘systematic’ if it supports technology that enables us to exert a modicum of influence over the course of events. What are the qualities that make a world systematic? First, the progression of events must follow a trajectory that is consistent with what each epoch knows as ‘reason’. That may be cause and effect or habit or like from like or just plain ole common sense . Whatever, future events must feel compatible with past events. Events, if they really are ‘events’, should be repeatable under comparable conditions; otherwise, they are not ‘events’ at all but miracles . When things appear to happen by chance , we can still find confirmation for our model by sublimating ‘chance’ to the laws of probability. Bottom line, every event should instantiate and confirm our models. Happenings that seem to fall outside that ‘big ontological tent’ are dealt with harshly in one of several ways: (1) We deny that the event occurred. We deny the evidence of our senses and trust instead the presuppositions of reason . After all, if we can’t repeat what happened, how do we know it really happened in the first place? (2) We deny that what happened was an ‘event’. We assume it must just be an anomalous part of a larger ‘happening’ that does instantiate and confirm our model and (therefore?) does constitute an event. (3) We accept that what happened was an event, and we admit that it does not fit into any of our presupposed schema. However, we attribute this disconnect to our ignorance rather than to the event itself. We assume that our understanding of the world will grow and eventually encompass all seemingly errant happenings. (4) We attribute the event to something ‘ineffable’ – e.g., magic, an extra-terrestrial intelligence, or spiritual agency. (5) We don’t see the ‘event’ at all. What event? What happened? I didn’t see anything, did you? A model, by definition, abstracts from reality and so simplifies reality. The models we have today, especially in science, are extremely accurate…as far as they go. We have done a great job of identifying life’s regularities and explaining them in terms of other regularities. We don’t let ourselves get overly concerned by the fact that our various models don’t mesh; we’ll figure that out somewhere down the road. Most events can be made to appear reasonable . Those that can’t, we can marginalize as random (see above). But there is another aspect of life that this dichotomy totally ignores: Particularity. Life is not all random or regular. There is another whole class of events that falls outside this classification scheme. These events are not obscure; they do not take place only in Tibet. In fact, you could argue that events in this third class, the class of particular events , are really the substructure of reality from which the concepts of regular and random are abstracted. Stochastic (one-off) events are not miracles . They are entirely consistent with the mainstream tenets of science, philosophy, and theology; but neither can they be predicted nor exhaustively described. They have no identifiable cause, but they may have innumerable verifiable consequences. Let me get specific! Good examples of particularity come from the world of genetics. By 1,500 BCE, Homo sapiens had been around for at least 50,000 years and the human population was somewhere between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000. Many of these folks contributed DNA to our current gene pool. That said, every one of us living today contains DNA from one single human couple (so-called ‘Adam and Eve’) who lived just 3,500 years ago (not 5,500 years ago as in Jewish tradition). ‘Adam and Eve’, unremarkable fellow-travelers in some caravan, most likely in Africa (not Mesopotamia), launched a cascade of events that materially affects every single human being alive today. So, same old story: boy meets girl, makes baby; what’s the big deal? Well, what if that exact ‘Adam’ had never met this exact ‘Eve’? What if they had never made love? Or produced live offspring? I could go on…and on. The event we’re calling ‘Adam and Eve’ is the product of innumerable past events and a contributor to innumerable future events. ‘Adam and Eve’ have revealed a world structure that is an hourglass shaped funnel: The sum of innumerable past events accounts for (but does not in any way determine) a particular event (e.g., ‘Adam and Eve’) which in turn influences (but in no way determines) innumerable future events. One-off ‘stochastic’ events can often appear to have virtually no consequences, and sometimes that may, in fact, be the case. But other times the consequences may just be long delayed; or they may be monumental and immediate. For example, every single human being on the face of the earth today would have a slightly different genetic code than they do now had it not been for ‘Adam and Eve’. How different would such a world be? Who knows? Who could possibly ever know? Things are not quite as systematic as we had hoped. Now consider this: What if every event is actually the neck, the focal point, of its own funnel? What if the collective past (a multiplicity) is feeding innumerable current events simultaneously, each of which in turn is projecting that collective past, uniquely modified by the pivotal event itself, into a collective future? Interestingly, 20th century British Philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, presented just such a model in his magnum opus , Process and Reality . If Whitehead is right, what happens to our reason and random model of reality? The Intellectual History of the Western World, at least since 50,000 BCE, can be characterized as the steady advance of models suggested by and consistent with the hypothesis of system . Obviously, these models work. They have unleashed a torrent of economic activity and technological development. Well and good, but what if it turns out that reality has a much deeper structure, not appreciated by our models? What if it turns out that this deeper structure is incompatible with the hypothesis of system ? Are we back to square one? How will we live with the lion’s roar now? How will we face the existential abyss? How will we deal with death? How will we propitiate nature to do our bidding? Must we revert to child sacrifice? Or have we ‘grown up’ to where we can accept the fact that we have no ultimate control over events? I am reminded of the Serenity Prayer : “Accept the things I cannot change…change the things I can…know the difference.” We are all alcoholics . We may not all crave booze, but almost all of us crave control. We come by it naturally; it’s in our genes ! Image: William of Ockham, from a stained glass window at a church in Surrey. 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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“Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” < Back Destiny Versus Fate David Cowles Jul 15, 2024 “Your Destiny is the Fate of others; the Destiny of others is your Fate.” Destiny and Fate are two words I hardly ever use. They seem to suggest a passivity that is alien to my philosophy…and perhaps to yours as well. But whenever I have used them, I’ve used them interchangeably…and I was wrong! Far from being interchangeable, Destiny and Fate are antonyms. And for just that reason, they turn out to be very useful concepts after all! Destiny concerns what you make of yourself. Fate concerns what the world makes of you. But even that is a gross oversimplification. Better to say, Destiny is what you can make of yourself; it is the sum of your possibilities. Fate is what the world wants to make of you; it is the sum of your limitations. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (fate) and the courage to change the things I can (destiny)…” Destiny and fate are templates. We live on the border. We have one foot in the so-called past and our other foot in the so-called future. We are straddling the fence. At 10AM we regard this as a curse, at 2PM we see it as a blessing. I am 5’ 4” tall; fate keeps me from realizing my dream of playing for the Boston Celtics. On the other hand, I may be destined to ride a Kentucky Derby winner someday. Best quit the high school basketball team and take up horseback riding. My curses can be my blessings just as my blessings may prove to be curses. My life is a Gestalt: I can see myself as the victim of fate or as the beneficiary of destiny. We all seem to have an almost insatiable desire to be ‘someone’, to make a difference, to leave the world a better place, to fulfill our unique destiny. I am the author of my own play, the world is my stage (Shakespeare) and you, dear readers, I might as well just say it, you are my props. So go on, hate me! It’s ok. Of course, you have your own destinies to fulfill, and potentially at least, I am one of your props. I’ll be yours if you’ll be mine, Valentine! So we’re both telling the same story, but in one version, I play the lead and in the other version, you do. Life is a high school director’s dream: every part is the lead! Your destiny is the self you choose to project (Whitehead: superject) into the world. It’s you as you’d like the world to remember you… a few billion years from now; as if! You control your destiny. If you don’t control it, it’s not your destiny, it’s your fate…over which you have no control. Destiny is what you make of yourself; Fate is what the World makes of you! Destiny comes from Latin meaning ‘to make firm’. Destiny is the stand you take against the World. It is the judgment you execute on the gods of Egypt (Exodus 12: 12). It is your mark, your footprint in the sand, your ripple on the surface of the sea. Fate comes from Latin meaning ‘that which has been said’. Pilate: “What I have written, I have written.” Fait accompli. Les jeux sont faits (Sartre). A black hole is ‘empty space’ with a dimensionless singularity at its center; 100% of its information content is located on its event horizon. You are a black hole! You are Neant (Sartre). Your destiny is your event horizon. It is you as pure information, you as superject. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (fate), the courage to change the things I can (destiny), and the wisdom to know the difference.” ( Serenity Prayer ) Ah, wisdom! A slippery commodity, that! The entire psychopathology of everyday life traces back to ‘wisdom’. Trying to alter things that cannot be changed (fate) can lead to depression, resentment, anger, and addiction. In extreme cases it can be symptomatic of psychosis, narcissism, megalomania, or solipsism. Failing to alter things that can be changed (destiny) is a symptom of laziness, cowardice, etc. It can lead to anxiety, rage, and a loss of self-worth. In extreme cases it can be symptomatic of neurosis and nihilism. Destiny is what you do to the world; Fate is what the world does to you. Your destiny is the fate of others; the destiny of others is your fate. Coming to be begins with not-being – not being what is. Sartre: “I am not what I am.” Before you are, you are not – you are not what is! You are acutely aware of what is; you are dimly conscious of what could be. You execute judgment on what is in the service of what could be. “I am what I am not”. (Sartre) You are responsible for your destiny. You are what you make yourself to be. But your little skiff is not merely storm tossed on a dark and raging sea. Your boat is equipped with a rudder to help you steer and, through the fog, you can just make out a beacon of light. ‘Eternal values’ (Whitehead) orient you on your way. Of course, nothing makes you sail toward the light; you can get your bearings from a full 360° of possible courses. It’s 100% up to you, it’s your destiny after all, but there is a safe harbor if you choose to take advantage of it. If you arrive safely home, you may say that the harbor was your destiny all along and that the lighthouse showed you the way. And that’s true! But you and only you sailed your vessel safely into port. Destiny and Fate are often seen to be in conflict. The dichotomy is enshrined in our modern Indo-European languages. When we speak using active voice verbs, we talk about destiny; when we speak in the passive voice, we talk about fate. We know how to struggle, how to fight, how to compete against others. Often, I pursue my destiny by limiting yours. I do for myself by doing to others: it’s the Golden Rule for survival in a bi-polar world. But is this ‘best practices’? Is it possible that I might enhance my destiny by helping you advance yours? Could it be that destinies can be reinforcing rather than conflicting? If I am your fate, might you harness that fate to help you achieve your destiny? If you are my fate, might I harness that fate? Could fate be a trampoline rather than a pile of sand…or a tar pit? Consider space travel. The #1 impediment is gravity. The thrust needed to overcome the Earth’s attraction requires an enormous expenditure of energy. But once I have put the blue planet in my rear view mirror (do spaceships have rear view mirrors?), I am can use the Sun’s gravity to slingshot my capsule into deep space. What was once an obstacle (Earth’s gravity) has now become a tool (Sun’s gravity)? Gravity, my fate, need not just limit my destiny; it may also facilitate it. Do we know how to align fate with destiny? Do we know how to work together toward common ends? How to harmonize the destiny of one with the destinies of all? Do we know how to love one another? Jesus final commandment, delivered to his disciples on the eve of his Crucifixion, was just this: “Love one another.” (John 13: 34) When we love one another, we want both of us to overcome our fates and fulfill our destinies. I understand that fulfilling my destiny includes you achieving yours. You destiny and mine become entwined. My destiny is your fate just as yours is mine. For the most part, one dampens the other; I limit you, you limit me. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Every so often, our destinies may reinforce each other instead. When that happens fate and destiny (your trajectory and mine) coincide, each amplifying the other. What do Utopia, the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of Heaven, and Pepperland have in common? They are states of being in which Destiny and Fate are one. Revelation tells us that Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. He is the convergence of Destiny and Fate. He is that from which the universe came to be (“without him nothing came to be” – John 1: 3) and that toward which the universe inexorably trends (“so that God is all in all” – First Corinthians 15: 28). According to Euclid, no two parallel lines ever intersect. But 10th grade geometry notwithstanding, the world is anything but Euclidean. According to the better geometer, John of Patmos (Revelation), all lines intersect…at the Alpha and at the Omega. 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 . purpose and devotion. 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< Back The Purpose of Civilization David Cowles Feb 4, 2025 “We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom!” It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it: civilization! It’s more or less what separates human beings from horseshoe crabs. In fact, the emergence of ‘civilization’ may be close to a defining trait for our species. No doubt, civilization confers reproductive and survival advantages, but it does so at a cost: environmental degradation and nearly perpetual warfare, for instance. But civilization has another, even more important function: It is said that only homo sapiens have a clear sense of universal mortality. Many species, even plants, feel the ‘loss’ of a departed mate. A few even mourn for life (e.g. swans). But few species appear to understand what’s happening when a mate dies. Trees will attempt to revitalize, sometimes successfully, near-by stumps and elephants follow quite elaborate rituals when caring for their dead. But only humans have Theater of the Absurd (Artaud): Jeremiah could not have been a bullfrog…nor could Ionesco. As far as we know, only humans have the concept of ‘apocalypse’, only humans study ‘eschatology’. So we are most truly human when, like St. Jerome (or Hamlet), we stare at a long-buried skull and remember, “I too will die ( memento mori ), everyone I love will die, everything I cherish will disintegrate.” Not easy to live with, but civilization to the rescue! We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom! Civilization provides each of us with a dizzying array of obligations and opportunities tailor made to focus our attention in the here and now. Sometimes, that can be a good thing, e.g., in meditation. Not here! The distraction known as civilization is so successful than even mature adults (50 – 70) go through life only dimly aware of the rapidly approaching singularity. Friends of mine in their 70s and 80s proclaim their intention to die at their desks and they are proud of it. They choose to live as though they were immortal, knowing they are not. I know, I was one of them. Is this ‘bad faith’ on a species level? You bet it is! Is it unforgiveable? Not at all. We are not just fleeing from the prospect of personal death; we are fleeing from the certainty of cosmic annihilation. It may be possible to face personal death with a modicum of grace if one feels that one’s life has served ‘a greater purpose’. Are there things you value above your own longevity? Beauty, Truth, Justice? A loved one? Then it may just be possible to approach personal mortality with equanimity, confident that meaning endures. Cosmic annihilation is another kettle-of-fish entirely. Now no meaning can endure because there is nothing left to ‘mean’ or to be ‘meant’. Apocalypse does not limit cosmos; it expunges it. Meaning cannot survive because (a) nothing survives and (b) it never existed in the first place. In their 1967 movie, Yellow Submarine , the Beatles used a ‘vacuum cleaner monster’ to illustrate this eventuality. The ‘dreaded vacuum’ sucks the very fabric of being into oblivion. Apocalypse does not mark the ‘boundary’ of something, it represents the ‘evaporation’ of everything. According to Victor Frankl, meaning (purpose) is a prerequisite of human sanity. With all possibility of meaning removed, one can only remain sane by shielding oneself from this realization, i.e. only by bad faith . Civilization exerts both a centripetal and a centrifugal force on us. Begin with the seemingly benign centripetal attraction of ‘belonging’. As a baby, family is my first experience of belonging, then my neighborhood, classroom, posse , etc. Later, parish, church, town, high school, college. These identities are more or less handed to us at various junctures during the game of life. They get some of us through adolescence. But then we are adults! We suddenly find ourselves alone in an even wider world, heading straight toward the edge of an abyss. To separate us from that inevitability we build our own Maginot Line. We dig moats and raise earthworks. We create relationships of ‘belonging’ to isolate ourselves in enclaves of order, i.e. to overcome entropy, to suspend time. We wrap ourselves in layer upon layer of false identities. We practice being oblivious to the absurdity of a world that ends with personal death and cosmic annihilation. As adults, we find belonging through our jobs: we identify with our companies, our unions, our work groups. Then we join country clubs and bowling leagues, PTA (or PETA) and the Neighborhood Watch. We designate a certain tavern as our local . Cheers, mate! Everybody knows your name. But at work, from the mailroom to the C-suite, there is order: people report to me, I report to people. All the time I am looking to advance, to claw my way up the socio-economic ladder. Position in the corporate hierarchy creates a sense of belonging too. Now I belong because I am not just like everyone else: I occupy a unique (and ‘indispensable’) position in the social mobile. Unimportant as I am, I imagine I cannot be replaced. I am an anonymous cog but without that cog there is no wheel. My unique position in the cosmic mobile defines me. And not just at work: my country club has a ladder too, a tennis ladder, and all golfers are required to maintain a ‘handicap’, a numerical expression of one person’s proficiency compared to all others. Disjunctively, centrifugally, I occupy a defined position in various social hierarchies. So I belong to the extent that I am like others, and I belong to the extent that I am unlike others. How can anyone escape this prison? “…When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” - Eliot Stay tuned. Watch for Escape from Civilization , coming soon to Thoughts While Shaving . Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Varieties of Social Organization David Cowles Oct 31, 2024 “Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate?” When we are born, our first consistent discrimination is probably ‘me/not-me’. My survival depends on understanding myself in relation to my environment. Gradually, I realize that that environment is not monochromatic. My mother relates to me differently from my stuffed animals…or the cat. Most importantly, I come to distinguish a loosely structured group of ‘big people’ who interact with me on a more or less regular basis. I will learn to think of those people as family . Et Voila , I have already begun drawing my social map of the world; I will continue to fill it in over the course of a lifetime. Later, I’ll learn that I am also part of a clan, a neighborhood, a school, a parish, a nation, a species, and ultimately, a biosphere. Later still, I’m told that my precious, autonomous body is itself made up of only slightly less autonomous bodies called cells . And these cells themselves house other semi-autonomous life forms (nuclei & mitochondria). It’s bewildering. There are currently 8 billion pseudo-me living on Planet Earth but 30 trillion mini-me (cells) make up my body. Chances are, I’ll shuffle off this mortal coil still utterly unable to fully comprehend these basic realities. My species, homo sapiens , covers most of a planet with a circumference of about 26,000 miles, soon to be connected by ‘filaments’ to other regions of space. So the phenomenon colloquially known as ‘me’ is really a nesting of bio-social spheroids extending over more than 20 orders of magnitude (from the size of a mitochondrion to the circumference of Planet Earth). Across this scale, there are numerous styles of social organization. The components of a cell are symbionts while the cells themselves form tissues, organs, and ultimately the single macro-organism you affectionately know as ‘me’. I in turn belong to a hierarchy of variously ordered societies. My family, for example, is organized differently from my gang, my community, my country, my church. I once suggested to my father that we model our family on a parliamentary democracy but, strangely enough, he did not see wisdom in my idea. Animal cells are products of the merger of previously independent, prokaryotic (nuclear free) cells to form a single entity. These eukaryotic cells repeatedly reproduce until they provide the full complement and diversity needed to form the adult body of a macro-organism. The Plant Kingdom exhibits different models of organization. For example, while animal behavior is often controlled by a central nervous system, plant intelligence tends to be distributed throughout the organism. Think Blockchain! Bacteria, on the other hand, remain prokaryotic. They function and reproduce independently but they freely exchange DNA and often cooperate with members of the same or different species to pursue mutual objectives. Some organisms organize into colonies - groups of genetically identical or closely related organisms, called zooids, that live together in a tight knit society, called Zooidland in an upcoming Lego Movie. Zooids are individual animals but they are also part of the larger colonial organism. Each zooid is capable of some degree of independent function. If necessary, it can survive outside the colony, but it can also work cooperatively as part of a larger whole. Coral is a good example of a colonial organization. In many colonial species, different zooids specialize in specific functions like feeding, reproduction, or defense. This specialization allows for more efficient overall functioning of the colony. But then these same zooids work together, e.g. to create a colony-wide circulatory system. So, colonies resemble animal bodies, on one hand, and animal societies on the other. As individual humans, we participate at several levels of organization. On the one hand, our bodies are societies of cooperating cells; on another, we are ‘cells’ cooperating in the form and function of transpersonal organizations (above). But we are also members of a species ( homo sapiens ) and of a biosphere ( Gaia ). Question : Am I the stuff my social networks are made of…or am I merely the intersection of the various networks in which I participate? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.