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Aletheia Today celebrates the Holiday Season by bridging the gap between faith and science. In this special edition, we explore the rich tapestry of holiday traditions through process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays. Addressing questions like "Is God real?" and "Does Heaven exist?", this issue offers a thoughtful exploration of the spiritual and scientific aspects of holiday celebrations, encouraging a harmonious dialogue between faith and reason. Inside Our Yuletide Issue Philosophy Do you Know What I am ? “I am my own great-grandmother (‘Eve’). Eerie…not to mention incestuous." Logical Positivism “Following the science, LP assumes that the same act, performed under the same conditions, will always produce the same result…it’s true, precisely 0% of the time!” Do We Need ‘God’? “Does the idea of a Supreme Being make you uncomfortable? No problem; just will it away!” Utilitarianism “Pragmatics is now the measure of all things. Unless we intervene!” Theology King Christmas “Isaiah’s vision of Eschaton is a vision of a world without conflict. Is such a world even conceivable? If it is, is it possible to conceive of Eschaton as anything other than such a world?” The ‘O Antiphons’ “We are asking Christ to come… to teach us, rescue us, shine on us, free us and, repeated three times, to save us.” 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." 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.” Culture & The Arts Love...Actually! “…When your identity is indefinitely plastic, when events are no longer ‘orientable’, when relations are neither transitive nor commutative, that’s Love…actually.” Why the World Needs Polymaths "Just as the ocean's waves weave tales in their dance, polymaths craft stories of innovation by seamlessly blending knowledge from diverse domains." Spirituality Do You Noh? “In the eternal present, not only is every historical event preserved in real time, but every possible event is preserved as well.“ The Mystery of the Star of Bethlehem For more than two millennia, the Star of Bethlehem, which guided the Magi to the city where Jesus was born, has been rousing the curiosity of researchers worldwide. Refresh the Crèche "Maybe it was that I, myself, had just given birth—but as I held the perfectly composed Mary in my hand, she no longer felt believable." Choices that Lead to Deception I often ponder over what drives individuals to opt for a deceitful path rather than a righteous one. Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back Better in the Long Run? David Cowles Jan 23, 2024 “If any action is ever to be considered morally superior to any other action, that superiority must reside in the act itself and not in its consequences.” How often have you said, “It will be better in the long run if…”? Seems straightforward - just so long as we know what ‘it’, ‘better’, and the ‘long run’ mean: What will be better? What makes it better? And when? Let’s worm our way in. “When will it be better?” Assuming we know what ‘now’ is and that we can snapshot it, we just need to know when to take our second picture for comparison purposes. But that’s problematic. The universe is expected to endure another 85 billion years. Which moment in that time frame will we designate as being ‘the long run’, i.e., our target moment for measurement purposes? And why that moment rather than another? Both Classical and Christian cultures make a lot of ‘the hour of our death’. Did he die heroically? What was the state of her soul? But why should that ‘final moment’ take precedence over any other moment? Is our ‘final moment’ one moment among innumerable others? Or is it the summation (Ʃ) of all our moments? Does your life really flash before your eyes? The universe is becoming progressively more disordered. Counterintuitively, there does not appear to be any limit to that disorder, other than heat death , i.e., non-existence. To the extent that value is contingent on at least a modicum of order, it will become ever more difficult to find value in the future. In contrast to the Enlightenment belief in ‘progress’, physics seems to support the much maligned notion of a primordial Golden Age that devolved into the present sorry state of affairs. The only problem with this is that it seems to equate Golden Age with Big Bang , and it’s hard to see how this moment of maximal order could also be the moment of maximal value. It seems that the relationship between order and value is not a simple linear function. Value is probably greatest in a ‘Twilight Zone’ where the ratio of order to disorder falls within a critical range. In any event, the notion of value without any order whatsoever is a bridge too far, at least for me. The ‘long run’ covers quite a span: from ‘the end of the day’ to ‘the end of time’. So when remains elusive. How about ‘better’? What’s ‘better’ and how do we measure it? Jeremy Bentham suggested we use ‘aggregate net pleasure’ as our measure. John Stuart Mill expanded Bentham’s ‘pleasure’ to the even more elusive ‘happiness’. Elsewhere, we considered Utilitarianism more fully. Even if one could locate a moment in time when aggregate happiness was maximal, it would be hard to equate that with ‘value’ if it was merely an island in a sea of misery. Thanks to Leibniz, we can avoid this by using the integral rather than the value at any given t, as our measure of the ‘long run’, but this requires us to sum ‘value’, Planck moment by moment, over at least 85 billion years. Notice how we’ve worked our way back from when to what . Now what’s this ‘it’ that is supposed to be ‘better in the long run’. Is it my personal state of mind? Or the aggregate states of mind of my family and friends? Or is it possible to define the domain more broadly? What roles do age, gender, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, class, and caste play in defining the ethical domain ? Working out an answer to this question has been our species’ #1 ethical task. Matthew’s “And who is my neighbor?” stands beside Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be?” as ultimate questions. And just as we seem finally to be headed toward some consensus on this matter, a brand- new variable has been introduced: other species! New, not new! Torah (1,500 to 500 BCE) makes it clear that the welfare of animals and agriculture was of critical concern to the early Israelites. Yes, they understood the utility value of ‘best practices’, but that was not the whole of it: ‘nature’ has inalienable rights too! PETA would have been in its glory. Unfortunately, Europeans lost sight of this wisdom, and we are paying the price. Now, the world is buzzing with ideas about how to make up for the damage we have inflicted on the biosphere, and we have finally come to terms with the fact that we are not descended from angels. We are, in fact, descended from other apes, primates, mammals, animals, and finally, from bacteria. We are discovering that the physiological and behavioral lines supposedly dividing us from ‘the others’ are more like smudges. Our species’ next great task is finding a proper place for other species in our ethical tent. And then there are bots! So the seemingly simple notion of ‘better in the long run’ turns out to be impossibly complex. What is the ‘it’ that is supposed to get better? What’s ‘better’ and how would we quantify ‘better’ so that we could measure it? Finally, what do we mean by ‘the long run’? The very next Planck instant (t + h )? Or the moment of heat death (ω)? Or some preferred moment between t and ω? Or the sum Ʃ of all t between t + h and ω? ‘Better in the long run’ turns out to be a ‘word salad’. We cannot define any of its terms, and no proposition framed this way can ever be tested. Like most ethical standards since Machiavelli, ‘better in the long run’ means ‘do whatever you want to do today’. Nothing is prohibited so everything is permitted. Quite literally, anything can be justified by resorting to an imaginary future. If any action is ever to be considered morally superior to any other action, that superiority must reside in the act itself and not in consequences that we can neither predict nor control. We can be neither omniscient nor omnipotent, but we can be Good . 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 The Porta Potty Perspective Annie D. Stutley "Job was, you might say, trapped in a Porta Potty right there in the desert, despairingly dejected and despondent." It began with an innocent craving for a York Peppermint Pattie. It was the end of the Sunday night of Mardi Gras in New Orleans a long, long time ago. The last float had passed, the crowd dispersed, and the party retreated upstairs to an apartment far above the muck below for some post-parade libations. All matters of the day settled, two more days of revelry on the horizon, the atmosphere inside nestled into the sweet smugness of good times rolling along...that is, until one member of the party--a friend--was motivated enough by a sudden craving to excuse herself from the carnival laissez-faire. She announced her intentions of a brief absence and set out across the street to where, in the banged up freezer of an old convenience store, would hopefully lie the frozen, artificially flavored mint delight of her deepest desire: a York Peppermint Pattie. She dodged carnival sludge and scattered, discarded beads in the street, for the street cleaners had not yet made their way to this slice of the avenue. She could hear them in the distance, beyond the arching oaks covered in colorful beads and the muted hollering of pop-up parties that dotted the route. She crossed not one, but two streetcar tracks, dodged more sludge and gooky parade throws until before her, lit up like a beacon of hope, was the blinking K under which she could “get the sensation.” But she suddenly had to “go”--a need to pee that came on as fast as the need for a Peppermint Pattie. How could she get the sensation properly while holding it in? To her right was a line of Porta Potties. It wasn’t ideal conditions, but it was better than rushing through her frozen mint chocolate moment. So she entered the last one in a line of publicly used and abused filth pots, locked the door, and did her business, unaware that pulling into the parking lot was the truck that would transport the pots of stinky gold to wherever they go to be cleaned. She also didn’t hear the sequence of padlocks clicking into place down the row of potties. It wasn’t until her door briefly rattled that she heard anything. Had a truck driven by or a gust of wind blown by? She wiped, zipped up, unlatched and pushed on the door, the peppermint pleasure seconds away. Only the door didn’t open but a tiny crack, and dangling in front of her eye was a padlock, quite definitely locked in place. Holy hell, I’m trapped , she thought. Holy hell, I’m trapped in a Porta Potty! It was the kind of realization usually accustomed to nightmare scenarios that belong in “would you rather” games? Would you rather be trapped in a Porta Potty or trapped in a tiny room with ten tarantulas? Dear God, I don’t know the answer! First, she screamed, “Help! Let me out!” until she was hoarse. No answer. Then she banged on the door until her fists hurt. Still no answer. Then she resigned her mind to the idea that she would either spend the night in a Porta Potty or die by death of toxic funk stench. The first would likely lead to the second. She thought about her brief 22 years on Earth--her parents, her boyfriend, all the dreams she never reached and that her death would probably turn into an urban legend. Until the end of time, at festivals and public gatherings all over the world, those with weak bladders would enter Porta Potties and joke to their friends, “Make sure no one locks me in!” Then she heard the worst sound she’d ever heard in her entire 22 years: the screeching sound of the motor of whatever machine drags a Porta Potty onto a truck. She pushed on the door and twisted her head so she could assess her inevitable doom. The Porta Potties were being connected to a mechanism that first dragged, then tilted them into the truck until they were upright again. Forget Mardi Gras sludge! She’d be covered in shit, swimming in shit, and undoubtedly die from shock of so much shit! Oh, hell no! This is not gonna go this way! So she pounded and yelled and kicked and screamed with all her might until, upon pushing on the door one last time, there on the other side of the padlock was another eye. She jumped back and then pushed on the door again. “What are you doing in there?” The voice of the eye was a weak, wavering voice. “What do you think?” she asked. “You’re not supposed to be in there,” the eye scolded her. “Well, you’re not supposed to lock me in!” she said. “Don’t you check these things before you lock them?” “It’s almost midnight.” The eye wouldn’t be discredited. But neither would she. “So! People still need to pee!" “You really should be more careful,” the eye began. “You should always bring someone with you when you go out like this.” Meanwhile, she was still stuck inside a Porta Potty and the eye was still outside in the land of fresh air. “Um, can you let me out, please?” she begged. The voice from the eye sighed, like maybe our friend's lack of judgment made her deserving of a few extra minutes surrounded by a day's worth of urine and carnival crap. Then, rather reluctantly, the padlock was released, and our peppermint protagonist burst through the door, gasping for air and sucking life into her lungs like she’d just been born. “Thank you,” she exhaled to the eye, which she now observed belonged to the oldest looking human being she’d ever seen. And she realized that it was no wonder he hadn’t heard her. He was 110 years old, probably half deaf, and yet moved with the pace of someone who acted like he had all the time in the world. He was a captor to be forgiven--just doing his job, though pretty badly. She shook his hand. She had been freed from death by human feces. That called for a generous dose of the human spirit. Then as if none of it had ever happened, she waltzed into the Circle K, meandered over to the freezer, and bought the only Peppermint Pattie still on the shelf. Either Peppermint Patties were a popular post-parade fare, or so unpopular were they that the one in her hand was as old as the eye itself. But none of that mattered, and as she sank her teeth into the curious blast of winter that settled onto her taste buds and ventilated her nostrils, a new perspective unleashed in her psyche. Shit happens, and sometimes it happens that we become trapped in it. Smelly, yes. repulsive, of course. But more than gross, it can be infectious--if we are weak to it. Shit tricks us into thinking it will always be this way, multiplying one negative thought on the other--despair on top of doubt on top of hopelessness. Job was, you might say, trapped in a Porta Potty right there in the desert, despairingly dejected and despondent. Like Job, it is far easier to let shit consume our outlook, define our future, yank us from hope, and control our thoughts, because whether we’re stuck in a Porta Potty or stuck in any terrible circumstance, it’s always easier to lose. Was it the day drinking turned night drinking talking, or had our friend experienced a life-changing nuance from within that Porta Potty? What if we considered all the problems consuming our fighting spirit to be nothing more than shit inside a Porta Potty? Your failing relationship, my anxious thoughts, this one's motherhood woes, that one's professional problems...your piles of crap and mine...what if we recognize that our losing response to our troubles is as infectious as the crap that almost compromised our poor, innocent, Peppermint Pattie-seeking friend? And furthermore, what if we decided that our moxie wasn’t going to go down with the shit of the world? What if instead we burst through our trapped door and breathe in a fresh perspective, one that refuses to succumb to negativity, refuses to give up hope for something better, and refuses to be taken down by the crap we permit to surround us? One that ultimately turns its back on all the muck and yuck and proclaims, "I know that my redeemer lives!" (Job 19:25), a resilience that knows we permit what our attitude promotes, one that leaves the past in the past, and gets on with living and believing, or, in the case of our friend, leaves the shit in the Porta Potty and gets on with the sensation for which she crossed St. Charles Avenue at midnight. I know enough to know that perspective can be found in the most unlikely places—like a used Porta Potty—but only if we’re open to perspective. Our friend teaches us a few lessons: never go to a public bathroom alone; never change direction without alerting your party firs; but more than anything, never let the shit get the best of you. If it isn’t worth the weight, don’t carry it into the future. Leave it in the toilet where it belongs. Our friend’s story didn’t reach urban legend status, yet it does have the makings of a sensational question: Would you rather be trapped in a Porta Potty of someone else's shit for ten minutes, or spend a lifetime trapped in a Porta Potty of your own making? Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines. Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back The Wonder School “Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes.” David Cowles Would you send your child to a school that didn’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic? Suppose that same school had a track record of producing PhD’s too young to toast their own success? It’s a wonder that anyone in our society learns anything at all. We have turned the whole process of education upside down. We begin by teaching abstract tools, the three Rs, before we give students any credible sense of how or why anyone would ever want to use these tools. This is not how human organisms work. We set goals, guided by transcendental values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice, and then we design, assemble or manufacture tools to help us achieve those goals. Our education system reverses the process. We drown our children in tool making exercises, long before they have any inkling of why they might want such tools. To paraphrase Jacques Ellul, we suppress curiosity and purpose in favor of La Technique , technical skill. Only children who manage to swim up through the swamp’s tangled undergrowth to the surface are allowed to climb onto lily pads to contemplate the stars. Those who do not make it to the surface, the majority as it turns out, are considered just so much collateral damage . Even those who do make it to the surface are often ‘changed’ by the ordeal. Some no longer have any interest in lily pads or stars; they are content to gorge themselves on the lavish buffet spread out on the swamp’s surface. Others are just grateful for the relative security of the lily pad. They are content to live out their days in sloth, never bothering to raise their heads. Not satisfied with the severity of ‘kill or be killed’ natural selection, we have added an arbitrary layer of cultural selection. Brilliant! We apply the same logic to the education of physicians. Day One, the med school class is full of young idealists, anxious to devote their lives to the wellbeing of humanity generally and the welfare of their own patients specifically. Suppose you’re the evil overlord of some hostile alien civilization (R U?). Your job is to stifle intellectual development on Planet Earth. How do you do that when the planet is covered with 2 and 3 year olds, chirping like hungry chicks in a nest, asking their never-ending questions. Your predecessor in this job, Herod the Great (c. 0 CE), came up with a clever solution: Slaughter all 2 year old boys (sic)! But how did that work out? Now you’ve been sent to come up with a more effective, and possibly less abhorrent, solution. According to the Handbook of 20 th Century Attrocities , when you cannot eradicate some social phenomenon by force, the next best thing is to co-opt it. And so you did! You designed an education ‘system’, powered by curiosity, but virtually guaranteed to extinguish that curiosity. You’re a marvel! Would you mind if I put your name in the hat for a Nobel? Your genius was to insert a layer of ‘technical tools’ (the legendary 3 R’s) between the questions and their answers. “I’d love to answer your questions, Susie, but first you need to master trigonometry. Let me know when you’ve done that, and then I’ll be glad to help you.” Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes. Why wouldn’t they be? They are thrown naked, ignorant, and defenseless onto an alien shore (Earth). They can’t afford to be bored, yet; their survival depends on figuring things out… and quickly. From their first cry in the delivery room, they are collecting data points for a personal Mappa Mundi . I can see why this would be threatening to an imperial power. But what happens apres vous ? Le Deluge ? (Louis XV) Perhaps a future generation of overlords will see some value in Earthlings’ insatiable curiosity. In anticipation of such an eventuality, I propose a pilot project, a test market. Let’s set up a small chain of magnet schools (we’ll call them Wonder Schools ) around the globe. Our founding motto: “Every question is a Nobel Prize in waiting!” So if my Wonder Schools are not going to teach the 3 R’s, what will they teach? Obviously, the curriculum will grow out of the specific interests of the students and their teachers. No two schools, no two grade levels, no two semesters will be the same. To accommodate the wide range of students’ curiosity, we’ll need to ‘stock’ our schools with enthusiastic, creative teachers who have multi-disciplinary interests. If this sounds a bit like 4 th /5 th century (BCE) Greece or 9 th century (CE) monastic Europe or 15 th /16 th century Italy (Renaissance), I’m ok with that. Our curriculum will emerge from the ground up, student directed, but our teachers need to be prepared with a few ‘standbys’... topics that can break the ice when things get sticky. Traditional (mis)education introduces new subjects to students as they mature. We will not do that! Our pre-K curriculum will mirror our Grade 12 curriculum…but at a very different level of depth, obviously. We conceptualize lifelong learning as a spiral, not a straight line. Of course, students will not study every subject every year; but neither is it ‘one and done’. Older students will often choose to re-explore, at a deeper level, subjects that they were exposed to at a younger age. Here are just a few ideas to get us going: Where are we? Look up! What’s in the sky (besides space junk)? All ages will enjoy exploring photos from the Webb and other telescopes. What have we learned from Voyager, Hubble, and Webb? Explore our solar system: what’s up with the neighbors? And what lies beyond? Where did all this come from and where is it headed? Students will be exposed to everything from Intelligent Design to Big Bang Cosmology, Bootstrapping, and Darwinian Evolution. Debate the fate of the universe: Big Crunch or Deep Freeze? Modern theories will be compared with views reflected in mythology, astrology, etc. Who are we? What am I made of? Where did I come from? What makes me, me? Subject to readiness, students will learn about the origins of life on Earth, DNA, cell structure, evolution, and the organization of the human organism. How am I my body? How am I not my body? The Hard Problem of Consciousness will be introduced. Are We alone? The Search for life, or ‘Intelligent life’ (SETI), in the Universe. Is there life outside Planet Earth? Is it intelligent? What are we looking for? What do we expect to find and how will we know when we’ve found it? How would life adapt to different environments? How would those environments influence the design and/or behavior of alien life forms? We’ve never been alone! We are surrounded by living things: pets, livestock, animals in the wild. Not to mention trees and flowers, coral and sponges, fungi and bacteria. How are we different from our pets? From other life forms? How are we alike? What do other life forms do better than us? Are other life forms aware of their environment? Do they feel? Do they emote? Do they think? Do they communicate? How? Do they use signs or symbols? How is their ‘language’ like/unlike ours? What is the role of family? What other social structures are operative? What about cultures, values, ethics? Advanced students may be introduced to the problem of Other Minds . Welcome to the Dinoverse A deep dive into the age of Giant Lizards. Where did they come from? How did they live? What happened to them? Will they come back? Can we bring them back? Should we? Students will learn about evolution, adaptation, and natural selection. Teachers will be encouraged to become familiar with Wonderful Life (Gould). Students will watch Jurassic Park , et al. We’ll never be alone! We are surrounded by things we’ve engineered. AI Bots are everywhere, embedded in everything. How are we different from our Bots? How are we alike? What do Bots do better than us? Are there things we do that Bots can’t do, now…or ever? Are AI Bots aware of their environment? Do they feel? Do they emote? Do they think? Do they communicate? How? Do they use signs or symbols? How is their ‘language’ like/unlike ours? Are they conscious? Can they be? Can they form social structures? Do they have cultures, values, ethics? To bot or not to bot, that is never the question! Rather, can we bolt on bots to make ourselves better? “Johnny got 3 wrong on his math test; maybe he needs a brain implant!” teased Julie. On the other hand, cells are populated with organelles descended from what once were independent organisms, assimilated into those cells and repurposed accordingly. Could that fate befall us? Students will be invited to watch episodes of Star Trek - The Next Generation , especially those that feature the Borg Collective, an early prototype for a post-organic civilization. Advanced students may be introduced to Alan Turing’s Imitation Game and John Searle’s Chinese Room . Welcome to the Marvelverse Stan Lee built a Universe, virtually from scratch. How did he do it? What are its features? It’s creatures? Does it have ‘laws’ (like our Universe)? What laws? How does ‘Marvel World’ compare with other ‘Other Worlds’, e.g. the worlds of Greek and Norse mythology, or of Kandinsky, Miro and Klee. Older students will be encouraged to explore the Many Worlds of Tolkien, either in film or in print. Finally, students will be encouraged to ‘create’ their own worlds, individually or in teams. This year’s science project: Create a Universe! Welcome to the Antiverse Traditionally, school has been about learning how things work. And you can do that at the Wonder School as well. But not everything does work, does it? The world is full of riddles and paradoxes and ‘unexplained phenomena’, and we’ll explore those here…at age appropriate levels, of course. Students may wish to grapple with Zeno, Godel, and/or Heisenberg; they’ll all surely want to pat Schoedinger’s cat. From UFOs to ESP to Crop Circles – it’s all on the table. Advanced students may wish to look into non-Euclidean geometries, non-orientable topologies (Mobius Strips), unreal numbers, etc. Episodes of Dr. Who (featuring the TARDIS) will be available for viewing. Note : there’s a Nobel waiting for the Wonder School student who resolves the problem of Quantum Gravity. We all Live in a Yellow Submarine Students will view the Beatles’ 1968 film as an example of late 20 th century mythology. Younger students will romp through the film’s many ‘alternate worlds’, imagining themselves confronting its various challenges. Older students will explore the film’s ground breaking ideas in biology, cosmology, physics, and metaphysics. They will compare the Beatles’ journey with ancient prototypes such as the Odyssey , the Divine Comedy , the Grail Legend, and the Crusades. Finally, all students will ask, “What is mythology anyway? Does it still play a role in our world?” Of course, this is just the surface of the stuff our classes will explore. But what about the pesky 3 Rs? Can you do honors level work without the ability to read or do arithmetic? Of course not! So we’ll have special skill workshops . When a student wants to learn to read or write or do math, we’ll have resource rooms available for them…but the impetus to learn must come from the students themselves. James Joyce ( Ulysses ) described the world as ‘signs we are here to read’. The Wonder School takes Joyce seriously. We trust our students to pick out the signs; we’ll help them read. 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

< Back Mary Magdalene, The Witness Rachel Held Evans "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." Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news:“I have seen the Lord!”—John 20:18 The story of how Mary Magdalene became known as a prostitute is a complicated one. One of six Marys that followed Jesus as a disciple, she was distinguished from the others through identification with her hometown of Magdala, a fishing village off the coast of the sea of Galilee. According to the gospels of Mark and Luke, Jesus cleansed Mary of seven demons, (a backstory infinitely more complicated and mysterious than prostitution, if you ask me), after which Mary became a devoted disciple, mentioned by Luke in the same context as the twelve, who traveled with Jesus and helped finance his ministry. In 597 pope Gregory the Great delivered a homily on Luke’s gospel in which he combined Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany (Martha’s sister), suggesting that this Mary was the same woman who wept at Jesus’ feet in Luke 7, and that one of the seven demons Jesus excised from her was sexual immorality. The idea caught on and was perpetuated in medieval art and literature, which often portrayed Mary as a weeping, penitent prostitute. In fact, the English word maudlin, meaning “weak and sentimental,” finds its derivation in this distorted image of Mary Magdalene. In 1969, the Vatican formally restated the Gospels’ distinction between Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the sinful woman of Luke 7, although it seems Martin Scorsese, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Mel Gibson have yet to get the message. A cynic might suggest that this mistake and its subsequent popularity represent a deliberate attempt to typecast and discredit a woman whose role in the gospel story is so critical and so revolutionary that the eastern orthodox Church refers to Mary Magdalene as equal to the apostles. Although she appears to have been a critical part of Jesus’ early ministry, Mary Magdalene’s extraordinary faithfulness shines most brightly in the story of the passion. After Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, his male disciples abandoned him. Judas delivered him over to the authorities for a bribe. Peter denied him three times. And only John, described as “the apostle whom Jesus loved,” was present at the crucifixion. But Mary Magdalene and the band of women who followed Jesus and supported his ministry are described by all four gospel writers as being present during the savior’s darkest hours. Even after Jesus took his last breath, and all hope of redemption seemed lost, the women stayed by their teacher and their friend and prepared his body for burial. It is precisely because they were present, loyal even through failure, that the women who followed Jesus were the first to witness the event that would define Christianity: the resurrection. Gospel accounts vary, but all four identify Mary Magdalene as among the first witnesses of the empty tomb. According to the synoptic Gospels, she and a group of women rose early that fateful morning, three days after Jesus had died, to anoint the body with spices and per- fumes. When they arrived at the tomb, they were met by divine messengers guarding the entrance, who declared that Jesus had risen from the dead, just as he said he would. The women immediately left the tomb behind and, “with fear and great joy” (Matthew 28:8), ran to tell the other disciples. Luke notes that on their way, they remembered what Jesus had taught them about resurrection, confirmation of the fact that these women had been present for some of Christ’s most important and intimate revelations and that they took these teachings to heart. But when the breathless women arrived at the home where the disciples had gathered, the men did not believe them. Women were considered unreliable witnesses at the time (a fact that perhaps explains why the apostle Paul omitted the women from the resurrection account entirely in his letter to the Corinthian church), so their proclamation of the good news was dismissed by the men as an “idle tale,” the type of silly gossip typical of uneducated women. Perhaps the men invoked the widely held belief that, just like their sister Eve, women were easily duped. A few, however, were curious enough to take a look at the tomb, and so, according to John’s account, Mary returned with peter and another disciple to the place she had encountered the messengers. The men saw for them-selves an empty grave and a pile of linen wrappings folded neatly within it, and conceded to the women that the tomb was indeed empty. However, John 20:9 notes, “they still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” The men returned to report what they had seen to the rest of the disciples, leaving Mary behind. Perhaps disciples posited the theory that Jesus’ body had been stolen, for John wrote that Mary, once so full of breathless excitement and impassioned belief, now stood outside the tomb, crying. Angels appeared and asked her what was wrong. “They have taken my Lord away,” she told them, fully accepting the disciple’s dismissal of her “idle tale." The angels were then joined by a mysterious man, whom Mary assumed to be the gardener. He, too, asked why she was crying. “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him,” she pleaded. Only when he called her by her name, did she recognize the man as Jesus. “Mary,” he said. “Rabboni!” she cried. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus urged as she fell before his feet, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And so again, Mary Magdalene ran to the house where the disciples were staying and told them she had seen the risen savior face-to-face. “I have seen the Lord!” she declared. But it was not until Jesus appeared to the men in person, allowing them to touch the wounds in his hands and side, that they finally believed. Far from being easily deceived, women were the first to make the connection between Christ’s teachings from scripture and his resurrection, and the first to believe these teachings when they mattered the most. For her valor in twice sharing the good news to the skeptical male disciples, the early church honored Mary Magdalene with the title of Apostle to the Apostles. 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. And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation of Christians and shouting, “he is risen!” to a chorused response of “he is risen indeed!” Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that distinction would always belong to a woman. *** This was an excerpt from A Year of Biblical Womanhood. This piece was republished with permission from rachelheldevans.com . *** Image: "Christ and St. Mary Magdalen at the Tomb." Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606-1669). Royal Collection Trust. Rachel Held Evans was a New York Times best-selling author whose books include Faith Unraveled (2010), A Year of Biblical Womanhood (2012), Searching for Sunday (2015), Inspired (2018). Hailing from Dayton, Tennessee—home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925— she wrote about faith, doubt and life in the Bible Belt. She was featured in The Washington Post , The Guardian , Christianity Today, Slate, The Huffington Post, The CNN Belief Blog, and on NPR, The BBC, The Today Show, and The View. She served on President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and kept a busy schedule speaking at churches, conferences, and colleges and universities around the country. Rachel and Dan welcomed their second child in 2018. Rachel passed away in 2019. Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back What Is Time? Sten Odenwald An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... St. Augustine said of time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I don’t know.” Time is an elusive concept: We all experience it, and yet, the challenge of defining it has tested philosophers and scientists for millennia. This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue of Astronomy . Read the rest of the article here . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Previous Next

< Back Official Launch of Aletheia Today Magazine David Cowles May 31, 2022 Your exclusive look at the all-new magazine for believers in science and God! Tomorrow, June 1, is a landmark day for Aletheia Today (AT). Tomorrow, we publish Issue #1 of AT Magazine (ATM, Summer 2022). Our first issue includes a total of ten feature length articles spread over four departments: The Great Convergence: Science in the 21st century Philosophy Theology Culture Features contributed by AT staff writers and independent contributors include: Science & the Yellow Submarine Eternity vs. Immortality Jesus meets Mr. Spock In the Tween & Teen section of ATM Issue #1 we have two articles: Vacuum Monster (from Yellow Submarine) Quark Soup Our Education, Evangelization, & Prayer section includes prayers, poems, and short stories written by contributing writers to AT Magazine. We want to engage with you, our readers, in every way possible. We encourage you to send us an email ( editor@aletheiatoday.com ) to leave comments on any of our articles, or to contribute something of your own for publication in a future issue. In order to promote engagement, Issue #1 includes two Reader Challenges . We encourage you to participate in those, as well and share them and any other article and essay that you find interesting with others. Finally, as a loyal reader of “Thoughts While Shaving,” we would like to offer you a chance to begin reading ATM Issue #1 right now , one day ahead of its official publication date! Click here for a peek at our first issue. Let us know what you think. - David Cowles, Editor-in-Chief, Aletheia Today 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 Being and Becoming David Cowles Aug 11, 2021 In the context of a conversation about Being and Becoming, a friend of mine asked, “Is eternal becoming possible?” My first reaction was that the concept of becoming was inherently dependent on time and that time is the antithesis of eternity. But then I got to thinking… In the context of a conversation about Being and Becoming, a friend of mine asked, “Is eternal becoming possible?” My first reaction was that the concept of becoming was inherently dependent on time and that time is the antithesis of eternity. But then I got to thinking… 20th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, generally regarded as the founder of ‘Process Philosophy’ (although many of his ideas show up in the works of Nicholas of Cusa 500 years earlier), believed that the world consists of atomic acts of becoming (he calls them “actual entities”) and that time is suspended during each such atomic act. For Whitehead, time is characteristic of the relationship among actual entities but absent from the process of ‘concrescence’ that takes place within each actual entity. So, according to Whitehead, eternal becoming is not only possible, it is the way the world works. So, I was wrong and my friend was right; thank you, John! 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 Bakunin and COVID 19 David Cowles Jun 20, 2023 “If someone says, “God told me to do it,” we confine them in a hospital setting. But if someone says, “I followed the science,” we elect that person to public office.” “I am guided by the science.” How often during the recent pandemic did we hear public officials recite that mantra? Meaning what? I have turned over my reason, my conscience, my moral authority, and my ethical duty to an amorphous collection of people and institutions guided by an ever-changing body of so-called ‘knowledge’? Once upon a time, folks used to say, “I am guided by my faith. I have turned over my reason, my conscience, my moral authority, and my ethical duty to God and to people and institutions sanctioned and guided by God.” Meet the new god (science), the same as the old God (YHWH). To the chagrin of many, there is no fundamental difference between “I am guided by the science” and “I am guided by the Word of God” ( aka the Bible, the Koran, etc.). In both cases, the speaker is subcontracting ‘moral responsibility’ to an external agent. It is a way of avoiding the always disappointing consequences of terrifying choices and timid actions. If someone says, “The Devil told me to do it,” we imprison them. If someone says, “God told me to do it,” we confine them in a hospital setting. But if someone says, “I followed the science,” we elect that person to public office. Yet, all three are really saying the exact same thing! As a 19 th century revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin (1814 – 1876) might have been expected to hold the precepts of modern science in high esteem, and so he did! But, unlike many of his comrades, then and now, he was singularly not fooled by the ‘science made me do it’ fallacy. On the one hand, he wrote: “We recognize the absolute authority of science…” Then he added: “…but we reject the infallibility and universality of the savant …the savants form a separate caste, in many ways analogous to the priesthood.” Bakunin consistently excoriates Big Science: “Suppose a learned academy…charged with legislation…frames none but laws in absolute harmony with the latest discoveries of science…Such legislation would be a monstrosity…” “…Human science is always and necessarily imperfect…A society that would obey legislation emanating from a scientific academy…would be a society, not of men (sic), but of brutes.” “…A scientific academy invested with a sovereignty, so to speak, absolute…would soon end in its own moral and intellectual corruption…such is the history of all academies.” “A scientific body, to which had been confided, the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair…its own eternal perpetuation…” “The government of science and of men (sic) of science…cannot fail to be impotent, ridiculous, inhuman, cruel, oppressive, exploiting, maleficent.” I wonder what he really thinks! Sidebar : Notice what is missing from Bakunin’s blistering critique. Nowhere does he mention the undemocratic way in which academy members are chosen, nor the fact that members are almost all white males, middle-aged or older. (He does decry the fact that they all come from the privileged classes .) Today, organizations like Antifa treat Bakunin as an intellectual forebear, but would he recognize himself in their ideology? As an intellectual, Bakunin paid the required homage to the scientific spirit, but as an ‘eternal anarchist’, he distrusted everything , including science itself: if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! Science, theology, theology, science, church, state, tomato, tomato! It is institutionalization per se that is the enemy. Marxism replaced the Judeo-Christian God with a pantheon of new deities: the State, History, Science, etc. Not Bakunin. For him, atheism is atheism, period. Importantly, Bakunin does not confine his Critique of Scientific Reason to the institutional side of science; like Beowulf, he confronts Grendel in her den: “…Science can grasp and name only the general significance of real facts, their relations, their laws – in short that which is permanent in their continual transformations – but never their material, individual side, palpitating so to speak with reality and life…Science comprehends the thought of reality, not reality itself: the thought of life, not life. That is its limit, its only really insuperable limit because it is founded on the very nature of thought…” Bakunin’s thought spans the length and breadth of western philosophy. The distinction he draws (above) is both reminiscent of Parmenides ( Aletheia and Doxa ) and anticipatory of Sartre ( en soi and pour soi ). Sartre’s best known novel, Nausea , is centered on the main character’s realization that Being incessantly and inevitably overflows the margins of ‘being’. Like Sartre, Bakunin finds value in art that is missing from science: “Science cannot go outside of the sphere of abstractions. In this respect, it is infinitely inferior to art…art in a certain sense individualizes the types and situations which it conceives…” Summing up, Bakunin writes: “What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt against science or rather against the government of science… to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again.” Such language! Reminiscent of God exiling Satan in Dante and Milton, even of God enchaining the sea in Genesis and Job. In recent years, science has been uncharacteristically center stage in our public forum. To some, it is, at least potentially, omniscient, and omnipotent. To others, it is a ‘hoax’. Still others acknowledge their dependence on science, even as they view it with a measure of distrust. Very few of us arrive at the nuanced assessment of science achieved by Bakunin almost 200 years ago. 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 Greenland II David Cowles Apr 24, 2025 “Right now, Russia and China control 52% of the shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean…the US just 6%...” Americans love success…or so we’re told. Actually, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. We hate the 1%ers, even as we idolize them. We excoriate ‘the old white men’ who expanded the continental US from Plymouth Rock to Alcatraz and from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Shoreline. Of course the culture of those times tolerated the worst forms of racism, exploitation, and ‘ethnic cleansing’. Don’t white wash that! But just as poorly as these expansionist administrations scored on human rights , they scored just that well on business acumen . Today, we have an opportunity to do something new. We can make strategic deals, and we can protect and even enhance human rights in the process. We no longer live in an age of ‘either/or’; this is the era of ‘both/and’ and for the sake of all parties concerned we need to take advantage of the opportunity this provides. In the meantime, let’s review some past transactions for guidance: Louisiana Purchase (1803) Purchased from France for $15 million (about $340 million in 2024 dollars) Covers all or part of 15 states Fiercely opposed by the Federalist Party (Washington, Adams, Hamilton): Unconstitutional (the President has no authority to acquire new territory) Too expensive ($15 million was 30% of the 1803 Federal budget) A threat to the party’s political power Incorporates more French and Spanish speakers into our population. Whatever you may think of the Federalists’ motives, their arguments were not factually wrong. But imagine how different world history might have been if their narrow mindedness had prevailed! Florida (1819) Acquired from Spain through the Adams-Onís Treaty Cost: $5 million (about $115 million in 2024 dollars) Today, Florida's real estate alone is valued at over $1.5 trillion Mexican Cession (1848) Result of the Mexican-American War Cost: $18 million (about $650 million in 2024 dollars) Spans California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming Today, California’s real estate alone is valued at approximately $7 trillion Gadsden Purchase (1853) Acquired from Mexico for $10 million (about $330 million in 2024 dollars) Includes southern Arizona and parts of New Mexico Opposed by politicians from Northern states: Too much to pay for “worthless desert land” Might strengthen the political power of the Southern (slave) states Gadsen’s opponents succeeded in scuttling a proposed $50 million deal for a much larger block of land. Alaska (1867) “Seward’s Folly”, purchased from Russia for $7.2 million ($140 million in 2024 dollars) Too much to pay for “frozen, worthless wilderness”. And now there’s Greenland (2025), a vast land mass rich in natural resources, strategically positioned to benefit from the New Northwest Passage across the Arctic Ocean, and vital to the defense of North America in the age of ICBMs. A European colony at least since 1721, Greenland is not likely to emerge from Danish custody anytime soon, despite a robust national independence movement. No surprise! It was the Europeans who first introduced the Western world to the phenomenon of colonization; and how did that work out? And what about the Greenlanders themselves? The 90% indigenous (Inuit) population ‘enjoys’ a median household income about half that of the Danes and Americans fighting over it. And what do these Greenlanders want? First, let me be clear: none of my best friends are Greenlanders. So far as I know, I’ve never even met a Greenlander! (I did have dinner once with the commander of NATO forces in Greenland but he, of course, was Danish.) But that won’t stop me from speculating, will it? (Hint: it never does.) I can do that because I’m willing to assume that Greenlanders want what almost everyone else on Planet Earth seems to want, the nationalist Trifecta: Cultural Identity Political Independence Economic Prosperity If I’m wrong, I apologize. But if I’m right, the way forward consists of three ‘simple’ steps: Political Independence from Denmark An economic and strategic ‘special relationship’ with the Unites States The option to choose Commonwealth Status or Statehood when and if desired Of course, it goes without saying that the Greenlanders themselves will be driving this bus every step of the way. For our part, the US would make a binding and verifiable commitment to preserving and strengthening the indigenous Inuit culture and its dominant language (West Greenlandic). We would extend our ‘iron dome’ strategic umbrella over the island, and we would take immediate steps to bring Greenlanders’ standard of living up to North American norms. This last step would be achieved primarily through massive investments in mining, manufacturing, and tourism (‘luxury’ as well as ‘eco’ - I hope I’ll be able to travel to Nuuk to see the ribbon cut at a new Four Seasons hotel and resort). However, realistically, there would probably need to be some initial investment of public funds toward ‘income support’ – not a big deal considering it includes fewer than 60,000 inhabitants, about the same size as Grand Forks, North Dakota. Unfortunately, the ‘forces of reaction’ in the US are at least as strong now as they were in 1803, 1853, and 1867. As a result, it is uncertain whether these steps will be undertaken any time soon. So what if they aren’t? Right now, Russia and China control 52% of the shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean; Canada controls 23%, Denmark 17%, and the US just 6%...an intolerable situation. Given these strategic considerations, we must ask, “Who are those in the US who oppose closer ties with Greenland?” The answer’s easy: progressive politicians, university academics, members of media editorial boards, late night talk show hosts, and Hollywood A-Listers. Which begs the question, “Why?” Perhaps reason #1 is Donald Trump. He favors it so it must be bad. But this is a misreading of history. In 1940 FDR defended Greenland against Nazi Denmark and in 1943, in the midst of a war in Europe and the Pacific, he diverted resources to build the giant Thule Air Force Base there. Nor is the incorporation of Greenland a Trump idea. It was first proposed by Harry Truman (1946), a Democrat, who offered the Danes $100,000,000 in Gold for the island. (That’s 1.5 Billion 2025 dollars, 100% of Greenland’s current annual GDP.) Denmark should have taken the deal! Today, it is costing the Danish government more than half a billion dollars a year to prop-up Greenland’s political and economic regime. So if you take Trump-phobia off the table, anti-Greenlanders need to ask themselves which of the following reasons account for their opposition: We are willing to strengthen Russia and China at the expense of American interests We should direct all available resources to fund the progressive social agenda We already have too many non-English speaking people in the US Greenland could become the first US state with a majority non-white population We don’t like cold weather…and nobody else should either All of the above. **** 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 YOU Make Life Worth Living David Cowles Jul 29, 2025 “Sartre said that Hell was ‘other people’; he was wrong…Other people are precisely what gives life its meaning, its purpose, its value…” In the 1950s Fulton J. Sheen, a Roman Catholic bishop, had a popular TV series called, Life is Worth Living . Pretty lame stuff by contemporary standards but in the ‘50s we were glued to our 14 inch black and white boob tubes. In our current, more nihilistic age, it may be worth revisiting the bishop’s theme. Absent some sort of transcendent standard, e.g. Scripture, or some extrinsic system of rewards and punishments, e.g. Heaven & Hell, what would it mean to say, “Life is worth living?” I propose a thought experiment. Admittedly, it’s flawed, perhaps you can improve upon it (suggestions welcome), but in the interim, it may be good enough to throw some light in our direction: Your life is near its natural end when you are visited by an angel. Bear with me! You are given an option. You can ‘go gentle into that good night’ or you can relive your present life from the moment of conception on. However, there are some ground rules: You will not be aware that you have lived before; everything will seem brand new to you…although you may have déjà vu moments. While you will have the illusion of making free choices, in fact you will repeat every decision and relive every experience exactly as you did before. Sorry, it’s not a ‘do over’; it’s just a ‘be-over’. After a moment’s reflection, you realize that you are being asked, not to choose a future, but to evaluate the past. Overall, did life’s joys outweigh its sorrows? Perhaps not. Life’s joys are fleeting, sorrows endure forever. Time is not the physician it’s been cracked up to be. Think of the 3 worst things that have happened to you in your lifetime – the pain, the fear, the loss, the sorrow, the regret. Is there any reward on earth that would make you live through those horrors again? Now, you may chime in, “I got through it once. Why wouldn’t I get through it again?” You got through it because you never ceased to hope, “This too will pass, better days are coming!” You are motivated by FOMO, so you’ll climb one more mountain, you’ll ford one more stream, you’ll follow one more rainbow, until you find your dream ( Sound of Music )…or not! Then you hoped but now you know . Then you saw through a glass darkly; now you see it face to face and it ain’t pretty. Better days are not coming and what will pass is life itself. The dream you’ll find is death, oblivion. Still curious? Didn’t think so! So thank you, angel - I’ll pass. Then fate ups the ante: “If you think so little of the life you’ve lived, why not just erase it? That way you’ll never have experienced any of that dreaded pain, and everything will be as though you’d never lived.” “You can do that?” “Yes, I can. I can erase your existence retroactively. No need to have suffered. So do we have a deal?” Hmm, this is starting to sound like the plot of a certain ‘Christmas movie’. Suddenly, you don’t feel so confident in your choice. But why? If you wouldn’t choose to relive your life, why would you choose to live it in the first place? What changed? Ignoring the possibility of some sort of continued existence after death, you know how your present story will end. So why go through everything you’ve gone through only to end up in an urn on someone’s mantlepiece…if you’re lucky? Yet it only takes a few seconds before you’re shouting, “No deal!” Again, what changed? Other people. You added other people (or other sentient beings) to the consideration mix. You think about the spouse you once loved, before your divorce, and still feel affection for. You think about the children you had together. And their children. And theirs. You wouldn’t erase any of that for all the world. I mean who are you to rob these people of their own chance to suffer? What about all the other young people you had the privilege of preparing for life in the ‘real world’? What about the folks whose needs you met though your chosen occupation? What about the friend you helped out in a crisis? The homeless man you heedlessly sp’anged? The endless bartenders and wait staff you over tipped? The struggling artist whose early work you purchased? The folks who enjoy reading your blog? Now let’s be clear. I am not saying that any of this ‘made the world a better place ; there’s no way we could know that. We can neither control nor predict the long term consequences of our actions. A butterfly flaps it swings in Borneo…but does that make it morally liable for the weather at O’Hare? All I’m saying is that you made certain peoples’ lives marginally better in the immediate term. Of course, you cannot know what their lives would have been like, especially longer term, if you had not interfered. Perhaps your well intentioned ‘helping hand’ kept them from ‘helping themselves’. Or maybe it enabled them to take the first tentative steps toward a better future. You’ll never know. Nor does it matter. You had to do what was right at the time. That’s all you can control. You did what you thought best…and you would do so again…and again, and again. To quote a certain itinerant preacher (1 st century CE), “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, would give him a stone?” (Matthew 7: 9) Nor are you willing to withhold your intervention, control-group style, to see what would have happened without you. So while hope may be in short supply these days, we still have faith…and love. You care about the welfare of others even though you can neither control nor predict it. At most you can influence it and then only over a very, very short term. “So no, Mr. Angel, you cannot annul my life. I’ll keep it, pain and all.” I retain the ‘naïve, childish’ faith that good intentions lead to good actions which in turn are somehow, almost magically, correlated with good ends. I can document the myriad ways I seemed to make the world better, locally, but I have no way of knowing how my actions impacted things globally. But naïve faith, plus love, more than makes up for the loss of hope, even in this age of cynicism. We’re not done yet! This insight, should you choose to accept it, has philosophical implications. For one thing, it reveals the long sought-after ‘meaning of life’. Sartre said that Hell was ‘other people’; he was wrong…at least in the context of this essay. ‘Other people’ are precisely what gives life its meaning, its purpose, its value. Other people is why no ‘sane’ person would ever agree to have their life expunged. We all do things for ourselves every day and there’s nothing wrong with that. We enjoy them; why shouldn’t we? But we mustn’t mistake enjoyment for meaning . Enjoyment is fleeting: pleasure passes. Not so, meaning! Meaning, by definition, is atemporal, eternal. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be meaning , would it? Being is ephemeral. Meaning is forever. ‘A’ comes and goes; so does ‘B’. But if ‘A means B’ that relationship is eternal. Of course, meanings too evolve with time, but the original meaning is never erased; new meanings are just added – as in the OED . Once A means B, A means B forever…even if later on it comes to mean C. In the lingo of the age, ‘enjoyment’ is a reinforcing token; it means ‘keep going’. ‘Meaning’ says ‘Stop!’ – you’re there now! Once something has ‘meaning’, it’s locked in. This is the sematic equivalent of the collapse of Schrödinger’s wave function: Meaning is measurement. Meaning is an ‘energy sink’. It is what it is, now…and evermore. No matter what the future brings, “We’ll always have Paris!” ( Casablanca ) So my life is very much worth living, and yes, I’d do it all again, but what makes it worthwhile is you … i.e. everyone I’ve been able to serve, if only briefly, and oh how insufficiently and imperfectly, along the way. Thank you for the opportunity! *** Vincent van Gogh. The Red Vineyard. 1888, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The painting mirrors the essay’s central idea that life’s value lies not in personal pleasure but in the meaning created through shared experience and service to others, even amid hardship. 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 Square Pegs in Round Holes David Cowles May 6, 2025 “2,450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we…stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs.” It began I suppose with Plato (c. 375 BCE)…like most everything else. His Timaeus , which Alfred North Whitehead dubbed the foundation of all Western philosophy, sought to explain the World in terms of the 5 aptly named ‘Platonic Solids’. The faces of each of these solids can be constructed from planar triangles. Plato’s concept of a triangle involved a flat construction, consisting of three straight line segments, intersecting at three nodes (vertices), and forming three internal angles, the sum of which is always 180°. No surprise here: Plato was ‘bookended’ by Pythagoras ( Pythagorean Theorem ) and Euclid ( The Elements ). Even today, when folks refer to a ‘triangle’, they most likely mean exactly what Plato meant 2450 years ago. Most likely…but not necessarily. The concept of ‘triangle’ inherited uncritically by, and then from, Plato has been expanded by more recent ‘discoveries’ in geometry and topology. Plato’s triangles are defined in the context of what is now known as Euclidean Geometry. However, certain ‘non-Euclidean’ geometries are internally consistent and externally relevant, at least in some applications. Generally speaking, non-Euclidean geometries apply to curved rather than flat surfaces. As a result, either parallel lines do not exist or, if they do, they intersect. The internal angles of a non-Euclidean triangle will not necessarily total 180° (may be more or less depending on the curvature of the surface) and the shortest distance between two points may be an arc. Most importantly for our purposes, a non-Euclidean cube will have curved edges. These newly discovered geometries still describe intuitively recognizable configurations of reality. We are all familiar, for example, with the surface of a ball. Whether your geometry is Euclidean or ‘non’, whether your topology is level or curved, whether you’re a flat-earther or a round-earther, certain generally accepted principles still apply; for example: If you’re walking from Boston to Detroit, you can expect to have many adventures along the way; keyword: along the way ! There is one kind of adventure you do not expect. You’re not concerned, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses , that you are about to step off into Eternity, or what amounts to the same thing, that you’ll suddenly and unexpectedly find yourself in Memphis. That’s because any path along any surface will be continuous. I call it the One Foot in Front of the Other property; Mathematicians call it the ‘Archimedean Property’. Translation: no one just ‘suddenly shows up’ in Memphis. It turns out that there are interesting and internally consistent geometries that don’t include the Archimedean Property and where people do suddenly ‘materialize’ on Beale Street. But not today; keep a look out for future TWS on that subject. Euclidean geometry is just a special, degenerate case (zero curvature) of more general non-Euclidean geometry. Just as we use the positive term ‘Entropic’ to represent a loss of actual order so we can use the positive term ‘Euclidean’ to represent a loss of potential variety. Why limit yourself to boring old 180° triangles when the angles of non-Euclidean triangles can add to any positive number up to 540°, depending on the curvature of the surface? Ok, I can smugly pose that question today…prior to c. 1800 CE, it was assumed that there was only one geometry… and that it was Euclidean . Imagine. For more than 2 millennia, Euclid was the only game in town. That’s 2000 years in a row that Euclid won all 4 PGA majors (the Masters, the US Open, the PGA Championship, and the ‘British’ Open)…and he wasn’t even a very good golfer. (You’d be embarrassed to show up at your posh country club with his handicap.) How’d he do it? Simple. He was the only golfer on the course. He was the GOAT, albeit a very lonely goat. Today, Euclid is just one entrant in a crowded field…and he struggles every week just to make the cut. We should keep Euclid in mind whenever we’re tempted to think ‘we know it all’. Remember: the thing you’re most sure of in all the world may turn out to be completely wrong! I am reminded of Sir Roger Penrose. A precocious lad, he was middle school age when his math teacher presented the class with a classic problem in geometry: “There is only one solution to this problem. No one has been able to prove that there’s only one but we’re sure that’s true.” Never say ‘sure’ to a rebellious teenager. Them’s fightin’ words, especially to a kid who would one day become ‘the smartest man on earth’. Next day, he arrived at school with a second solution to the problem. Then he discovered other solutions. Today, we know that there are an infinite number of solutions to the so-called ‘tiling problem’. So what? Who cares? Euclid was a genius with the best of intentions and his ideas no doubt did a lot of good; but he also took Western metaphysics down a rabbit hole from which it is still struggling to emerge. For two millennia we assumed that we lived in a ‘flatland’ made up entirely of straight lines; we don’t. On the contrary, everything curves! You’re 14 years old and you’ve just enrolled in your first high school physics class. Day one, your teacher (you go to a progressive school) takes the class to a billiards parlor (pool hall to you) so that you can observe first hand ‘cause and effect’ in action. Balls collide, momentum is transferred, angles of incidence determine angles of reflection, etc. It’s all very neat and clean…and linear. The real world is rarely neat and clean and it’s never linear. In fact, it is massively non-linear and recursive. Everything affects everything else. Worse, everything that ‘acts’ acts on itself at the same time. Think karma . Whatever you’re doing to another, you’re doing the same to yourself. “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself.” Ultimately, the foundation of all ethics will turn out to be self-interest…once we understand what those interests are. This gives the meme, ‘whoever lives by the sword dies by the sword’, a whole new meaning. Unfortunately, Euclidean linearity has infected every corner of our thought process. We are determined to describe the world in terms of discrete entities (subjects) acting on (verbs) other discrete entities (objects); we are committed to viewing all ‘transmissions of influence’ as straight lines. Welcome to the modern Indo-European language family. As a result, what we know, or at least what we knew before 1800, conforms to the straight-edged geometry of a Euclidean cube. Let’s suppose we know everything we can know, not everything there is to know, but everything we can know. Suppose we model everything there is to know as a sphere, dense with information; everything we can know would be a subset of that sphere. But because of our Euclidean blinders, whatever we do (or can) know must conform to the geometry of a straight edged cube. Suppose you say, “We already know everything we can know…or close to it.” Ok, I’ll spot you that. As a Harvard professor (c. 1896) told graduating seniors re physics, we know virtually everything that it is possible to know. Whatever we don’t know isn’t worth knowing. According to this model, the cube of what we can (and do) know must fit inside the sphere of what is knowable; it’s a subset after all. Obviously, we want as much of the volume of the sphere as possible to lie inside the inscribed cube. But we are ultimately limited by the fact that our sphere is round while our cube must have straight edges. So, the 8 vertices of the cube, and only those 8 points, will lie on the surface of the sphere. Still as long as the volume of what we can know is close to the volume of the sphere of what’s knowable, we’re ok for most purposes, right? I mean, nobody likes a know-it-all. A little bit of uncertainty ( aka ignorance) keeps life interesting, don’t you think? I’m fine with this as long as the cubic volume of knowable information includes most of the spherical volume of all information. So how close is it? Is it a 90% match? Surely it can’t be less than 80%, right? Would you believe it’s slightly less than 37%? By confining our thinking to phenomena that can be modeled via Euclidean geometry, we limit what we can know to less than 3/8ths of what is available to be known. A dismal performance! On the other hand, putting the same problem in a non-Euclidean context allows the edges of the cube to bow and extend so that they template the inner surface of the sphere. By analogy, our insistence on treating the non-linear universe as if it were an assemblage of linear forms leaves us 63% blind. 2450 years after Plato we still don’t have a clue…and we won’t, until we free our thought process from its Euclidean play pen and stop trying to fill round holes with square pegs. Image: M. C. Escher. Relativity. 1953. Lithograph print. 27.7 cm × 29.2 cm. 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.