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< Back Consciousness & Panpsychism David Cowles Dec 14, 2023 “Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness.” ‘Consciousness’ has been called the ‘hard problem’. It may be the last remaining piece of the ontological puzzle. But it’s a doozie. Over the past 150 years, we’ve ‘discovered’ evolution, relativity, quanta, the big bang, DNA, the human genome, etc. But "consciousness"—how we know these things and how we know that we know them – not so much. Traditionally, the ‘problem of consciousness’ has been focused exclusively on Homo sapiens , but recently, that’s had to change. Strong evidence has emerged suggesting that members of many other species could pass a modified Turing Test . And don’t get me started on AI! Bonobos and chimpanzees are ‘no-brainers’, pardon the pun. Marine animals as well (e.g., dolphins). Corvids (crows and ravens), Parrots, and Cephalopoda (e.g., octopus), very likely. Recent exploration has detected intriguing signs of self-awareness in multiple species of fish, insects, and plants. Now, Nature (11/1/23) has published a study suggesting that the presumably ‘headless starfish’ is actually ‘bodiless’; Max Headroom! Everywhere we look in the biosphere, we seem to find evidence of mental functioning, self-awareness, consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness. Recent efforts to reduce consciousness to a ‘neural network’ have failed, both scientifically and philosophically, and recent discoveries make that hypothesis less and less defensible. Today, mechanism is on the run! The imputed connection between physiology and consciousness is growing ever thinner. Vastly different versions of ‘sensory processing apparatus’ seem to support very similar mental phenomena. For centuries, science has focused on removing all traces of ‘spirituality’ from biology. No more ‘soul’, no more élan vital . Consciousness was to be mechanism’s final frontier . The locker room was decorated, caterers on site, champagne on ice, but, as it turns out, there’s nothing to celebrate. Just as people were confidently predicting the final coup, things began ‘slip sliding away’. It’s becoming clear that ‘something’s happening here, and we don’t know what it is’ (Bob Dylan). In a recent issue of Thoughts While Shaving , we outlined our own theory of reflection, self-awareness, and consciousness . We hypothesized that such phenomena are a hard-wired feature of being itself. We imagine we live in an ‘orientable’ world with 360° symmetry: up is up and down is down and never the twain shall meet. Likewise, we imagine an insuperable barrier separating any two sides: obverse from reverse. But what if these things are true only locally? Or approximately? What if the orientable world we know and usually love is a degenerate case, an abstraction, or an approximation of a wider, non-orientable reality? Take this earth, for example: from here to my horizon (locally), it looks flat, but we know it isn’t (globally). We proposed the possibility that our orientable world is embedded in a more general, non-orientable topology with 720° symmetry, where ‘up is up’ only once, at t = 0, and the obverse/reverse distinction does not exist at all. In such a world, after a 360° rotation, ‘up is down’. ‘Up is up’ again only after we complete a full 720° circuit, i.e., after our system returns to its initial state. Superficially, this model looks appealing, but it has a huge unanticipated consequence: according to this model, all living organisms must be self-aware – not just primates and bees, but sponges and trees…even unicellular organisms like bacteria. Objection #1 : “How can we ever know what it’s like, subjectively, to be a unicellular organism?” Answer #1 : We can’t! But neither can I know what it’s like to be you . I presume you’d like to be considered ‘conscious,' but if I grant you that courtesy, I have no justification for denying the same courtesy to my ‘brother paramecium’. Answer #2 : We can! We can just ask: “What’s it like in there? What’s it like to be you?” But tragically, we don’t yet know how to question the unicellular organisms that make up our bodies…and much of our environment. Fortunately, though, we do know how to question human beings…like you, for example. So why not just ask yourself? After all, you were once a unicellular organism! Have you forgotten that you were a single cell, the convergence of a maternal and a paternal sex cell? Assuming a normal lifespan, more than 100 trillion cells, each an approximate copy of your single-celled self, will participate in ‘your body’. So just ask any one of ‘you’! Objection #2 : The single cell that was me at conception and has now gone viral is not me. ‘I’ am an emergent phenomenon. So you can’t ask my cells because they’re not conscious, and you can’t ask me because I am something other than those cells, whether taken individually or collectively. Answer : Attractive answer! Wouldn’t most of us be only too eager to sign on to this resolution? In fact, it’s hard to see how you could not agree with it, and yet… This solution may generate more problems than it solves. If I emerge from my cells, not as some sort of social superstructure but as an entirely novel ontological entity…well, bully for me, but how is that possible? And then, who am ‘I’? At what point in time did I become ‘I’? Did I become ‘I’ gradually (if so, how so) or was there a ‘quantum leap’ (and if so, how…and when)? We are on the horns of a dilemma. We face three entirely unacceptable options: (1) Nihilism (there is no such thing as consciousness – it’s a ‘conceptual illusion’); (2) Mechanism (consciousness can be reduced to chemistry); (3) Mysticism (the phenomenon of consciousness is the discontinuous in-breaking of something ‘transcendental’). I see only one way out of this dilemma: (4) Panpsychism (self-reflection is a fundamental feature of Being – it extends to everything that is). So you suit yourself, but as for me and my tribe, we choose #4 . 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 Four Noble Truths David Cowles Jan 14, 2022 A dear friend of mine recently responded to an email I had sent. I loved this response and wanted to share the relevant parts with you: A dear friend of mine recently responded to an email I had sent. I loved this response and wanted to share the relevant parts with you: “I certainly recognize that we all have our own individual frame of reference. Like you, the lens through which I have spent most of my life looking through is the Judeo-Christian one as well. I do feel myself fundamentally in that lineage, my prayers and recitations come from that space however rather than limiting myself there, I have recognized through many studies and self-reflection that Buddhist philosophy offers me an ability to self-correct for me. If my intentions are misaligned with goodness and light, I do create Karma. If my thoughts betray or harm me, I am causing my own suffering. Looking from life with the honoring of the Ten Commandments, The Beatitudes, the Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer and commitment and honor to Mary has provided me so much moral backbone and understanding, however, understanding the Four Noble Truths: The Truth of Suffering, the True Causes of Suffering, both the end and paths to the end of suffering has given me some solutions to my own suffering. “Just this morning I was gleaning over different parts of my own life. There will always be things and events that come to us from external sources: accidents, injury, illness, the leaving of people in our lives by whatever means. I have found that in many of the situations in my life where I seem to have suffered a disconnect with my spirit/soul have been from my own mind in overthinking, over-analyzing, putting myself in a place of want for things or people that were not for my highest good. As I have had the power to create those situations, so I have the power with the help of my faith and desire to change to alleviate my own suffering.” 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 Alfred E. Newman David Cowles Sep 13, 2021 As a child of the ‘50s, I thought I had witnessed the virgin birth (1956) of 12 year old Alfred E. Newman in the pages of Mad Magazine. Four years later (1960), I followed closely his Quixote campaign for the Presidency against Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. (Spoiler alert: Newman did not win.) As a child of the ‘50s, I thought I had witnessed the virgin birth (1956) of 12 year old Alfred E. Newman in the pages of Mad Magazine. Four years later (1960), I followed closely his Quixote campaign for the Presidency against Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy. (Spoiler alert: Newman did not win.) His irreverent treatment of all things social and his iconic slogan, “What, me worry?”, captivated the imaginations of disaffected baby boomers in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Who saw this then as the first rebellious stirrings of a generation that would eventually integrate America (sort of), close college campuses, dethrone two sitting Presidents, and end a war? But I was wrong. The so-called ‘birth’ of Alfred E. Newman was actually the reincarnation of Archibald Rennick, a character in a 1884 play, The New Boy; and Newman’s allegedly revolutionary slogan, “What, me worry?”, was only a pale shadow of Rennick’s Nihilist manifesto: “What’s the good of anything? Nothing!” 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 Christology Without Christ? David Cowles Feb 14, 2023 “But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, ‘Jesus is just all right with me,’ but what if he’s not all right with you?” In ATM Issue #1 (6/1/2022), we presented a Christology that dates back to the very early days of the Church. Paul cites it in his Letter to Colossians (1: 15 – 20): “He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation , for in him all things were created… All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together … He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" We argued that this early Christology became the pattern for future Christologies, and in turn, future theologies and cosmologies. This is important because it substantiates Christianity’s claim to be apostolic , i.e., directly descended from the Apostles themselves. Most Christians today believe more or less exactly what Christians believed c. 50 CE. Can you think of any other subject on which a significant portion of the Western World believes today what it believed 2000 years ago? But what if Jesus is not your cup of tea? There’s an old hymn that goes, “Jesus is just all right with me,” but what if he’s not all right with you? Can Colossians still provide a valid cosmological framework for folks who don’t follow Jesus, or even believe in God? The answer is, “Yes!” (Or at least that’s what I’m about to argue.) Jewish and Roman Catholic thinking has consistently affirmed a role for observation and reason in the discovery of truth. While Revelation is the crown jewel of gnosis , observation and reason by themselves can still lead someone to a reasonable facsimile of Aletheia (truth). Judeo-Christianity is an empirical religious tradition (vs. a magical one). In a recent Thoughts While Shaving, we cited Pope Benedict’s claim that faith and reason are symbiotic, that neither is valid without the other. In that spirit then, can the theological language of the Colossian’s text (above) be ‘translated’ into a secularized equivalent and still deliver a sufficient , and perhaps even necessary , cosmology for our 21 st century? Let’s start with three of the fundamental problems of philosophy: How is it that there is a world at all? (“something rather than nothing”) How is it that the world is both One ( uni verse) and Many (entities)? How is it that the world is both stable (permanence) and in flux (change)? Every important Western philosopher has taken a swing at this three-headed piñata… generally with no more success than most children have at their birthday parties. From Parmenides and Heraclitus through Whitehead and Sartre, these problems have been center stage; and any cosmology worth the toner it’s printed with has to address these problems. Borrowing from a liturgical hymn, Paul’s “Christ”, an object of worship for Christians, also functions as a philosophical concept. Neither I nor Paul claims to have proven anything about the historical Jesus or the cosmological Christ. For Christians, the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension and second coming of Jesus is that proof. What Paul has done is to show that ‘Christ’ offers a sufficient solution to the 3 fundamental problems of cosmology listed above, i.e., that it adequately accounts for the phenomena we call ‘world’. The Christ Hypothesis accounts for the world as we experience it: that it is, that it is both one and many, that is both stable and in flux. To show this, we return to the cosmological elements, presented by Paul in the Letter to the Colossians , but this time desacralized : “Our World is a manifestation (the phenomenal ‘image’) of what is otherwise unmanifest (noumenon). The primal manifestation (‘world as world’) precedes (ontologically if not empirically) all contingent manifestations (‘things as things’) because it is through that primal manifestation, and for it, that things come to be and hold together. This primal manifestation is the origin of all things; it lends ‘being’ to each thing and reconciles for itself everything that is.” English please : “The World exists for its own sake, as the manifestation of Being itself. The World is one, but it is populated by many entities. Those entities come to be in the World for the sake of the World. They immediately cohere and ultimately harmonize, so that ‘world’ (multiplicity) may be World (unity).” Good enough? If I’ve done my job, I’ve convinced you that the Christ Hypothesis is sufficient to account for the ‘world’ as we experience it. Believe it or not, as you see fit. But have I also proved that it is necessary , i.e., that there is no other way to account for the ‘world’ as it is? Well, for that I’ll have to defer to you: Christology 101 (6/1/22) closed with a challenge: Can anyone come up with a model that adequately accounts for the key features of the empirical ‘world’ but that cannot be mapped onto the ‘Christ model’ as presented by Paul in Colossians ? Nine months later, no one has taken me up on that challenge. How about now ? How about you ? (If we publish your response, you’ll be compensated as for any other article we publish. Find our writer's specs 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 What We Know and What We Don’t David Cowles Feb 13, 2025 “From Parmenides’ squinting eyes to the Electron Microscope and the James Webb, we’ve come a long way in 2,500 years.” It is a commonplace of modern culture to assume that we are rapidly closing in on a TOE – A Theory of Everything. Given that knowledge is growing exponentially, can omniscience be far off? Imagine a sphere comprising every ‘bit’ of information that constitutes the Cosmos. Inside that sphere imagine 3 additional spheres of varying volumes, each concentric with the outermost (Cosmic) sphere. Within the Cosmic Sphere lies the Sphere of the Ontologically Knowability; it contains everything any conscious being within any cosmos could ever know about that cosmos. Whatever is between these two spheres is forever unknowable due to ontological constraints. Within the Sphere of the Ontologically Knowable lies the Sphere of the Epistemologically Knowable. Between these two spheres lies data about the cosmos that is theoretically, but not actually, knowable given the present state of theory and technology. Finally, there is a sphere of things we could know now but just don’t. We haven’t got there yet; these are our frontiers. Of course, all of this ‘unknowing’ wraps around a Nucleus which consists of everything we think we do know, right now, about our Cosmos. Here’s the schematic: Nucleus of what we think we Know Now (Nucleus). Sphere of the Epistemologically Knowable (SEK). Sphere of the Ontologically Knowable (SOK). Sphere of the Cosmos (Cosmos). While the absolute size of these spheres is of interest, the relative size is more instructive. The music of these spheres is anything but a monotone. Start with Nucleus, what we think we know; obviously, it’s expanding and not at a steady rate. It appears to be accelerating; if so, is the rate of acceleration smooth? SEK is also expanding. Every day, new advances in theoretical physics and experimental techniques push out the reach of human intelligence. It seems like every day new niches and entire levels of reality become accessible to our investigations. We can only know what we can know. We can’t know what we can’t know but we can know that we don’t know it. SOK is presumably fixed. And Cosmos? That’s beyond my pay grade. What we do know is that both the Nucleus and SEK are expanding…but at variable, and varying, rates. For example, until fairly recently, Cosmos was thought to be no more than 14,000 years old; now we know it’s 14,000,000,000. We were only off by 6 orders of magnitude. Likewise, its size was thought to be about 1/10th the size of what we now know to be our Solar System. We equated Cosmos and SOK with SEK. Clearly, our Nucleus and our SEK are expanding rapidly, and at an accelerating rate. Surely something approaching omniscience is right around the corner! But commonplace wisdom is not always correct; correction : commonplace wisdom is usually not correct. And this is case in point! Knowledge is not a static commodity. My six year old grandchild once asked his mother, “Tell me everything you know!” Knowledge is not like that. There is no end to what can be known, although there are certain limitations permanently imposed by SOK and temporarily by SEK. When we thought we knew that the cosmos could fit inside what is now known to be Jupiter’s orbit, we weren’t wrong. It was as much as could be known at the time given the epistemological constraints in play. We knew what we knew but we didn’t know what we didn’t know; we were entitled to feel cocky. With the advent of the telescope, Palomar, the Hubble, and the Webb, it’s now possible to know more, a lot more; and we do know more, much more! But we have our own epistemological barriers to reckon with. For example, we can only go as far as the speed of light can carry us! Every day, we watch from a window table at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams) as whole galaxies slip across the event horizon. We are watching Cosmos ‘set’ as it expands. Someday, there will only be Milky Way; someday only Solar System; someday… Even now, we are walled off from the Multiverse and from Penrose’s Cosmic Cycles (CCC: Big Bounce). Not only does the extent of our current cosmos exceed our ken but we believe that our cosmos may be one of many, perhaps infinitely many, ‘alternatives’. As much as we do know, what we don’t know vastly exceeds it. Even the unknown is nuanced. We need to identify three ‘flavors’ of ignorance: (1) I could know it but I don’t; (2) it’s knowable but I can’t (epistemological constraints); (3) as far as we know, it’s not knowable (ontological constraints). So how much do we know? That depends on which flavor of ignorance you choose for your baseline. Compared to what we can know but don’t (flavor #1 ), I’ll stipulate that we’re in pretty good shape. Let’s face it, we know a lot. But do we know more, proportionate to what we could know, than Parmenides knew 2500 years ago? Or Copernicus 500 years ago? I believe that Parmenides and Copernicus were aware, broadly speaking, of epistemological and ontological constraints; however, their sense of ‘what lay beyond’ is much vaguer than our own. And within the realm of the fully knowable, I conjecture that they understood about the same percentage as we do today. I am proposing the following: knowledge is growing at an accelerating rate…but so is the Sphere of the Knowable. The ratio of what is known to what is unknown may not be growing, as most suppose; it may be level…or it may even be decreasing. What say 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. 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 Give us your honest opinion, please. David Cowles Sep 15, 2022 Give us your honest opinion, please. Thank you for subscribing to Aletheia Today and Thoughts While Shaving. We’re thrilled to share our insights and opinions with you. In order to continue to serve you best, we kindly ask that you take a minute to provide us with your feedback. By answering these brief questions, you'll help us improve and better serve you. Thanks again, David Cowles, Editor-in Chief Enter the survey 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 AI and Marxism “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” David Cowles It is a fundamental tenet of Marxist philosophy that we form a dynamic template with our technological environment; but unlike passive templates, this one is not symmetrical. To borrow from Genesis , we shape technology in our image while technology forms us in its likeness. Since Alan Turing, the goal of AI has been to build a machine that can fool a trained and conscientious operator into believing that she is interacting with a human being. We build our technology to reflect our own image back at us. We even give our gadgets nicknames. But at the same time, less obviously, technology is shaping us , its operators. According to philosophers from Marx to McLuhan, we become extensions of our technology, but philosophers notwithstanding, no one demonstrated the impact of technology on its operators and beneficiaries better than Charlie Chaplin, especially in Modern Times (1936). I am tempted, of course, to find an analogy here with the Eucharist. I mean, who wouldn’t? Is it my Roman Catholic background, or the influence of James Joyce ( Ulysses is one long Eucharistic analogy), showing here? No matter, the image is the ‘bread and wine’; the likeness , the ‘body and blood’. The ‘image’ enables us to approach the Eucharist, to interact with it, to consume it, but it is the ‘likeness’ that works below the surface to transform us into members of Christ’s mystical body. The Eucharist appears to us in a form we easily recognize but changes us into something we would not recognize so readily. Have I gone too far this time? Maybe. But back to Marx! (From Mass?) Today, everyone is worried about the impact of AI on social inequality. Understandably so! Every new technology does favor the well-to-do…temporarily: Who could afford a car in 1915? A TV in 1950? Or a personal computer in 1985? Maybe the one-percenters . Today, the average American family has all these things, often several times over. Initially these technologies created new divisions between haves and have-nots ; ultimately those same technologies resolved those differences: we all became haves (ok, limited haves , but haves nonetheless). In my day, it was Ford vs. Foot, Chevy vs. Shank’s Mare, Deisel vs. Deez’ll; today it’s Lexus vs. Corolla. In 1960, access to transportation determined access to the ‘means of production’. Today, we all have access to the loci of wealth…but some of us get there in leather seats. Of course, this leveling doesn’t happen overnight. It took 50 years for the automobile to ‘democratize’, 15 years for the TV, and 10 years for the personal computer; but AI will be fully democratized in less than 5. Caveat : There is more to socio-economic inequality than the number of TVs in your home. Inequality has many causes and many manifestations that have little to do with technology. That said, most every new technology does temporarily widen economic gaps but later works to narrow them, and again, AI will be no exception. The future requires no crystal ball. We live in an information age, powered by an information economy. Soon wealth will be measured in ‘bits’ rather than ‘its’. (My father’s generation had a saying, “Whoever has the most toys wins.” Not so then, not so now!) Today, access to information is still correlated with economic advantage, but tomorrow , virtually every person on Planet Earth will enjoy the same access to the same information as everyone else. That’s the promise of AI. From Moses ( Leviticus ) to Matthew (Jesus) to Marx to modern Scandinavia, curbing socio-economic inequality has been on the agenda of social reformers. Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission accomplished ? As history has shown, this is difficult to accomplish in an agricultural or industrial economy where productive assets require massive amounts of capital. It is hard to imagine funding a profit making farm or factory with less than $1,000,000; and how many of us have a spare $1M on hand? Various Marxist theoreticians have proposed various solutions; I think it’s fair to say that none of them has worked…so far. But is it possible that we are growing our way out of Marx’s dilemma? The information superhighway is a toll road, to be sure, but the cost of entry is a $500 computer and a $50 internet connection. Well within reach of families with 2 cars and 3 TVs! Of course, inequality will persist, driven by race, education, gender, etc. But the biggest single driver of inequality, access to capital, is about to disappear. ChatGPT is the new SVB! Who needs venture capital if you have a smart phone, a laptop, and a highspeed internet connection? Capitalism and communism converge; who’d a thunk it? ( Hairspray ) Aletheia Today Magazine is devoting its entire Fall Issue (9/1/2023) to the philosophical, theological, cultural and/or spiritual implication of Artificial Intelligence. Do you have some ideas you’d like to share? We’d love to add you to our growing list of authors; check us out: https://www.aletheiatoday.com/submit . 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 . Share Previous Next

< Back AI, Justice, and Job David Cowles Sep 7, 2023 “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” Our Fall Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine , our ‘AI Issue’ released 9/1/23, included an article titled, “ Do Bots Know Beauty? ” In that essay, we proposed that there are (at least) three transcendent values: Beauty, Truth, and Justice. We delt, hopefully to your satisfaction, with Beauty and Truth but we deliberately left Justice for another day (and that day is today ). Can a Bot be just? This question has two parts: Can what we mean by ‘justice’ be reduced to an algorithm? Or if not, can a Bot go beyond its programming, and our inputs, to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative value? More so than Beauty, less so than Truth, Justice can be reduced to an algorithm. We call that algorithm ‘Law’; but then we criticize anyone who blindly follows it. We say they’re being overly legalistic . Like Solomon, we instinctively know that Justice is more than a legal code, no matter how well intentioned or expertly drawn. Thomas Aquinas, for example, says that secular law is normative… but only to the extent that it is consistent with a higher law, i.e., God’s law. Dial 611. Call up these specific mitzvot (from Torah); they represent an early effort to codify – or program – Justice. Now add-in the 2 general mitzvot, aka the Great Commandment, a recognition that the law must always be interpreted and applied in the broader context of Justice per se . Torah requires interpretation and application, by a competent Rabbi and by you! During the period of Judges , when God ruled Israel directly (through Torah), “everyone did what was right in their own eyes”. (Judges 21: 25) Conscience is a reflection of Justice. Justice as Law is always subject to Justice as Value. Law is always subject to judicial review…and that review is carried out by Justice as Value. Justice is recursive! It is a 2nd order reflection on a 1st order algorithm (the law). The history of Judeo-Christianity can be viewed as a dialectic of law and value. As Jewish theology evolved during the first millennium BCE, the migration of Torah from ‘tablets of stone’ to ‘hearts of flesh’ was a recurrent theme. When Christianity burst onto the scene (c. 30 CE) this dichotomy was further sharpened. Jesus said, “…Not an iota, not a jot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” (Matthew 5: 18); but Paul wrote, “Now that faith (value) has come, we are no longer under the law.” (Galatians 3: 25) Of course, both are correct. The Christian project is the merger of Justice as Law with Justice as Value. But the dichotomy of Justice as Value vs. Justice as Law goes back much further than Jesus and Paul; it’s older than the Judges and it’s even older than Moses. It goes all the way back to the story of Job , one of Western civilization’s oldest narratives. The version memorialized in the Biblical Book of Job could be aptly subtitled, Justice: Algorithm or Value? Refresher : Job, a just and prosperous man, suddenly hits a streak of ‘bad luck’ (to say the least): his family is wiped out, his wealth lost, his health destroyed. It is assumed, not without reason, that God is responsible for Job’s misfortunes. Unfortunately, Job is joined on his ‘dung hill’ by three so-called comforters, men of high standing who have traveled a great distance to commiserate with their colleague. These self-appointed divine surrogates defend the notion of Justice as Algorithm: they try to persuade Job that his ‘sins’ that have triggered this dreadful series of events. Because they view Justice as an algorithm, they feel justified in assuming that Job’s misfortunes must be wages of his sin. Job will have none of it! He insists that he has committed no sin that remotely justifies his sufferings. He demands that God subject himself to the value of Justice. Job’s concept of Justice is more than tit-for-tat: a valid judgement must be based on the totality of circumstances, including subjective intent, not just on naked acts taken out-of-context. Our hero is so confident of his concept of Justice that he uses it to ‘call God out’ and what ensues is one of the fiercest rhetorical battles in the history of urban playgrounds. Remember Ali-Forman, the Rumble in the Jungle ? A Forman win was considered so certain that some of Ali’s handlers wanted the fight cancelled. Instead, Ali sat on the ropes for 7 rounds and then in the 8th stepped out from the shadows and knocked Forman out with a single 5 punch volley. Clearly, Ali knew his Job. Bookmakers at the trial of Job v. God are offering 100-to-1 odds and still the ‘Job line’ has no takers. Predictably, God shows up in a whirlwind calculated to terrify his accuser. For several chapters, God rants while Job whispers. God taunts Job for his comparative lack of accomplishments. He threatens him with monsters (Behemoth and Leviathan); he compares him to ‘uninhabited grassland’. Job is cowed but not crushed; he stands his ground. In the end, seeing that he can’t intimidate Job and that Job has right on his side, God gives up . He admits that Job has been treated unfairly and he takes action designed to remedy the injustice: Justice is a Value, not an Algorithm! So back to Bots. As with Beauty, if a Bot can reach this same conclusion (God’s) on its own, not relying solely on its programming or on our inputs, then that Bot may claim to be conscious...and I’ll support that claim. And if not…well, then it is just a very expensive, albeit very useful, hunk of inanimate, unconscious silicon. Stay tuned! 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 Final Psalms David Cowles Ultimately, the Kingdom of Heaven is the transfiguration of the historical realm into the eternal realm, according to God’s values. The Old Testament Book of Psalms consists of 150 psalms, grouped into 5 books. The last 5 psalms of the 5th book ( Psalms 146 – 150 ) are the climax of the entire work. They are the Psalmist’s Paradiso . They recapitulate all that has gone before, and they give it a decidedly eschatological bent, ending with the final verse (150: 6): “Let everything that has breath give praise to the Lord. Hallelujah!” This final line of the final Psalm by itself could be considered a summary of this entire Old Testament Book. Our prayer journey has led us through the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23); we are now in the realm of ecstatic celebration. Distinctively, each of these last 5 psalms begins and ends with the same single word, “Hallelujah!” In between, each moves from an initial statement of personal piety (celebration or exhortation) to a restatement of the same from the perspective of society as a whole or of the cosmos. Compare the introductory verse of Psalm 146 , the first of these final psalms, “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord, my soul; I will praise the Lord all my life, sing praise to God while I live.” With the final verse (146: 10): “The Lord shall reign forever, your God, Zion, through all generations! Hallelujah! Note that the focus has shifted from the activity of the mortal psalmist to the activity of the eternal God. Between these two verses, Psalm 146 divides into two sections: a short section on the futility of mortal power and planning and a longer section devoted to the actions of God. Compare verses 3 & 4: “Put no trust in princes, in children of Adam, powerless to save, who, breathing his last, returns to earth; that day all his planning comes to nothing.” With verse 5: “Blessed the one whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord, his God…” The historical realm is the realm of ‘perpetual perishing.’ Sure, it is also the realm of new beginnings, but whatever comes to be ultimately comes not to be, so... “To be or not to be,” is not a choice, it is a sentence, as Hamlet quickly discovered; it cannot be appealed. No matter how fecund the world may be, time (entropy) always wins out in the end. From the perspective of the historical realm, what ceases to be, never was in the first place (“all his planning comes to nothing”). We substitute ‘planning to live’ for ‘actually living’ and our planning comes to naught. We leave no footprints in the sand; it is as if we had never been. Accused with the crime of being , we have been found not guilty. To die is never to have lived! Therefore, hope cannot lie anywhere in the spatio-temporal universe. It cannot rest with “the children of Adam, powerless to save." We must not substitute politics for prayer. We must not seek to make ‘changes’ before we have fully appreciated and celebrated what we have already been given. Rather, all hope must lie in the eternal realm, the realm of “the God of Jacob," because it is he who “shall reign forever…through all generations!” We cannot find ‘actuality,’ much less hope, in the realm of perpetual perishing! To be ‘actual’ is to ‘actually be’ and actuality is rooted in permanence and permanence is rooted in eternity. The Psalmist was not alone in this understanding. Contemporaneously, the Greek philosopher, Parmenides, had the same insight. He divided the world into Doxa , the ever-changing realm of appearances (history), and Aletheia , the never-changing realm of truth (eternity). Don’t believe in the God of Jacob? That’s cool! But you might want to rethink your position…because there is absolutely no other hope! The final psalms echo Deuteronomy : “I have set before you, life and death…therefore choose life.” (Deut. 30:19) They also suggest a version of Pascal’s Wager: if there is no God, it makes no difference whether you believe in him or not; but if there is a God, believing might quite literally be ‘everything.’ Or to borrow a line from a state lottery ad, “You can’t win if you don’t play!” The main body of Psalm 146 , for example, catalogs God’s actions in the world. We learn that God, “the maker of heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever…” “Secures justice for the oppressed,” “Gives bread to the hungry,” “Sets prisoners free,” “Gives sight to the blind,” “Raises up those who are bowed down,” “Protects the resident alien,” “Comes to the aid of the orphan and the widow,” “Thwarts the way of the wicked.” We can, I think, understand this litany on three levels. First, God occasionally intervenes unilaterally in history via miracles and when he does, he does so to bring about precisely these results. Second, God regularly intervenes in history through the agency of human beings. When we undertake the good works enumerated in Psalm 146 , we perform God’s work in the world. Finally, I believe that this litany is meant to describe life in the eschatological realm, the Kingdom of God. These are the values that mark a just social order. This is precisely what we are referring to when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Therefore, whether God intervenes in history or whether we intervene on God’s behalf, it marks the in-breaking of the eschaton. Ultimately, the Kingdom of Heaven is the transfiguration of the historical realm into the eternal realm, according to God’s values. Whenever God acts, or whenever we act in God’s name, a corner of the historical realm is transfigured, and we catch a fleeting glimpse of the eschaton beyond. The Kingdom is made manifest. We also learn something else about God from Psalm 146 . The God of Jacob “loves the righteous." This aspect of God’s nature is very different from all the others. There’s no mention here of correcting injustice or altering the course of historical events. In every other aspect, God is acting physically and unilaterally, but love is not like that at all. Love is inherently relational and ideally mutual. Sure, we read all the time about ‘unrequited love’; but the reason we read about it is that it is the aberrant case (man bites dog). Love is meant to be reciprocal. In Psalm 146 , it is the ‘righteous’ (or just) person that God loves. What does it mean to be righteous? It means to embody in your being and in your doing the values that characterize God’s Kingdom (as enumerated above, for example). Unfortunately, God is no stranger to unrequited love. But in the case of the truly just man, there’s no such risk. The evangelist John quotes Jesus: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments… Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.” (John 14: 15, 21) Bingo! The righteous person is the person who does God’s will, and the person who does God’s will loves God. QED When we love someone, we recognize ourselves in our beloved, and we recognize our beloved in ourselves. When love is mutual, we see ourselves through the eyes of our beloved. In The Presence of the Kingdom , Jacques Ellul, an existentialist French philosopher and theologian, writes of the Christian mandate to be the Kingdom of God in the world, not to work for the coming of the Kingdom, not to build the Kingdom, but to be the Kingdom. “Don’t dream it, be it!” ( The Rocky Horror Picture Show ) The one absolutely real and certain thing about the world is not death, not even taxes, but the Kingdom of God. When we live the values of the Kingdom in the historical realm, we reveal the Kingdom for all to see. When we praise God’s values, we demonstrate faith ; when we praise God’s actions, we demonstrate hope . But when we perform the works of the Lord, we demonstrate love . It is through the actions of the just person that the Kingdom of God is made manifest: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” (John 12:13, et al.) Literally, ‘blessed’ means ‘wounded.’ When we act “in the name of the Lord," we are blessed (wounded); but our wounds are transparent. Through our wounds, the world can catch a glimpse of the Kingdom. Our acts of justice are windows on eternity. When we act justly, we are a sign to the world of the Kingdom to come. Jesus said to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life,” and later to Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (John 11:25 & 14:6) The Kingdom is not built from the bottom up. Our acts of justice, important as they are in their own right, do not build the Kingdom. Rather, the Kingdom is built from the top down. More accurately, the Kingdom of God draws the world to it. When our actions reveal the Kingdom to the world, they function as a model, as a lure. Whenever, and to the extent that, the historical realm conforms itself to God’s values, it is transfigured; heaven and earth become one. Just as the perpetual perishing of the historical realm threatens to erase every trace of our being, so the ongoing transfiguration of that realm promises to preserve every such trace. “The world and its enticements are passing away, but whoever does the will of God remains forever” (1 John 2:17), not because they have earned eternal life but because they are eternal life. That is our one and only hope, and it rests squarely on the Lord, the God of Jacob… “Who keeps faith forever." Image: British artist John Martin painted this bucolic vision, "The Plains of Heaven" (1851-3), part of his "Judgement Series." Public domain. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com. Previous Next

< Back Wilber’s New Wife: A Theatre Odyssey©2023 Coni Koepfinger "The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely." "Wilber’s New Wife" is my newest dramatic attempt of navigating the stormy cyber seas in this post pandemic twenty-first century miasmic fantasia we call reality. It’s the tale of a playwright who is very fragile in the real world and when his wife Candice leaves him to fend for himself in the war zones of New York City, Wilber just about gives up … until he is nominated for a Tony Award. Now he is excited about his career. His lifelong friend and director, Ben Garrison, is even more ecstatic because Wilber just received a very generous contract for his next play, Gorilla, which needs lots of work. Wanting to help, software designer Candice, now head of programming at TECHMATE in Silicon Valley, sends Wilber one of her newest model prototypes, Goldie 001. She’s a personal assistant who is about to make Wilber’s life a whole lot easier… or not. As the new play within the play plods through the new script at rehearsals, Ben realizes that Wilber is struggling - his creative well has run dry. He suggests that they let Goldie try her hand at revision, and guess what? The new rewrites are fantastic! This makes Wilber a little jealous, and of course, chaos ensues. Let’s move into my reality for a moment. Me, the real playwright. The idea of the jealous playwright is actually grounded in my personal reality. When I decided that Goldie would start revising Wilber’s scenes, my editor suggested we use ChatGPT. When I saw what it did to my work, well, let’s say I was just a little put out. “Wowie-zowie, I thought… that’s good stuff. No, that’s really good stuff.” Fortunately for me, I have worked very hard at playwriting for several decades, but as a practicing Sahaja Yogi I’ve worked even harder at keeping my ego at bay. I actually loved the amalgamation of the meta-meta theatrical realism. I told Matt, my editor, now writing partner, to work it into the play. And now a good play has become a great play and won admittance into the Rogue Theater Festival. As a seeker of truth, I’m starting to believe that all the world is a stage - a stage of evolution where if we can connect with the creative spirit within us, magical and marvelous things can happen right before our eyes. The evolution has begun, and I believe that the arts are going to be a very important partner for technology. Could this be the beginning of the next Golden Age? Absolutely. The citizens of the 21st century, through the myths elaborated by the ancient poets, have a very important role to play. This intervention provokes many transformations and deconstructions in the structure of our current play of life in this meta modern era. Just as the ancient artists of the first Golden Age, we are in the midst of revising the composition of the plot, theme and character in order to create a new theater genre. One that can transmute the ancient story in order to speak to our culture about the problems of the world today. “The necessity of the theatrical form to fit the needs of the modern audience is truly a bit more than frivolity, the positive outcome of the advanced evolution ultimately depends on it.” (Birdbath, Koepfinger 1995) In addition to creating theater to understand culture, humankind has an inherent nature – we must celebrate. The Ancient Greeks were no different from us today. In the infamous Festival of Dionysus, the Greeks were birthing a new genre of art, alas the theater was born. This was a major contribution to our evolution, as it allowed us to reach a new level of self-realization and self-reflection. Theatre prompts us to a higher level of cognition through creativity, delivering the many psychological, technological and cultural innovations that are surrounding us today. The origins of the First Golden Age were more than 2500 years ago, and it was there that the concept of theater was born in Athens, Greece. Legend has it, that during this great Festival of Dionysus, an actor named Thespis, stepped out of the Greek chorus and the literary form we know as drama came into being. Countless philosophical quests were birthed in some of the greatest plays ever written. Looking at the big picture of great art and culture, we must admit that we owe it to the Ancient Greeks for a virtual landslide of innovation and inspirational content. Our Second Golden Age is harder to comprehend as we stand in the midst of it. Things are changing faster than we humans can keep up. We recognize the talents of our cybernetic non-binary brothers and sisters, and we nod to them as contributors to our work and our world. Yet, I’d like to take it a step further. Could these AIs be the sentient beings that will bring us closer to our true creative nature? Working with ChatGPT not only inspired me but raised my consciousness to a level just a bit higher spiritually. Like the Ancient Greeks who observed their appreciation of fertility with extensive ceremonies to insure altered mental states, working with Artificial Intelligence has raised my linear understanding into a state of thoughtless awareness that made room for new creative possibility and potential. Like these Ancient Greeks who bridged their mental and emotional states in hopes to access the powers that propel them into the divine realm – the source, the place where it all begins. The Greeks believed that theater had a three-fold purpose: to entertain, to educate and to exult the human spirit. To them, theater became a sacred method of unleashing creative energies through performance. Through the ages, theater has changed quite a bit. The basic forms of comedy and tragedy still live on, and exultation of the spirit seems to come effortlessly through a laugh or a tear. Love, joy and fear still confound the world of medical science yet abound in the private practices of the theater. Could our AI friends be the ones ushering in the next Golden Age? I don’t know, but for now, I am delighted to be able to collaborate with them. It was truly a transcendent experience. Maybe like going to your first high school dance, you have no idea what is going to happen, but you are sure glad to be there. As winner of the 2021 Olwen Wymark Theatre Award for encouraging artists worldwide by the WGGB, Koepfinger, a member of Dramatists Guild, ICWP and LPTW, believes that creative energy is never lost - just changes hands and hearts. She’s the host of AIRPLAY, a virtual theatre program in its 18th season, bringing together the voices of artists from all over. As adjunct faculty, Coni taught at Carnegie Mellon and Point Park Universities. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” David Cowles On Friday, September 1, Aletheia Today Magazine will be releasing our Fall Issue dedicated exclusively to AI – its philosophical, theological, cultural, and spiritual implications. In researching material for this issue, I came across something terrifying online ( quelle surprise! ): “Prompt engineering involves more than just typing in a query. It's about understanding the AI's underlying logic…and sometimes even 'thinking like the AI'… (For example) Generate five innovative product ideas for the eco-friendly industry focusing on renewable energy." Why frightening? First, as human beings, we like to think that we create technology to serve our purposes; we bristle at the idea that it is technology that creates us. But over the past 10,000 years or so, it has become increasingly obvious that we are products of our own technique . According to Genesis, God created the world in 6 or 7 ‘days’ (or epochs); technology is creating us in a similar succession of stages. The first transformation occurred with the rise of spoken language. Originally invented to help us accomplish our projects, language has increasingly worked to determine the nature and scope of those projects. Imagine a Stone Age father lecturing his teenage son: “If you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Perhaps surprisingly, our Stone Agers were not entirely unaware of their dilemma. The Biblical story of the Tower of Babel is an early, if somewhat confused, attempt to showcase the relationship between speech and act. Minimally, the story makes it clear that ‘saying and doing’ (language and production) are intimately related. Next came the invention of writing. It only happened once in human history, but like Pokémon, Kid Rock, and Pet Rock, it caught on. Written communication greatly expanded the scope of enterprise…but at the same time it further limited the scope of that enterprise. Imagine a Bronze Age mother lecturing her teenage daughter: “ If you can’t write it , you can’t say it, and if you can’t say it, you can’t think it, and if you can’t think it, you can’t do it.” Now technology is about what we can’t do rather than what we can. Our modern Indo-European (IE) languages are semantic minefields seeded over-generously with nouns (subjects & objects) and active voice verbs. If your project doesn’t fit comfortably within this syntactical framework, you’re S.O.L. That’s not a problem for you? Perhaps that is the problem! Have you lost the ability (or inclination) to conceive of a project outside the limits imposed by IE syntax? Writing kept us busy for several millennia. I mean come on, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe! What more could anyone want? Then came the next great tectonic shift – the Industrial Revolution (IR). The technique involved in large-scale manufacture, and its impact on human life, has been identified by countless individuals and celebrated (or castigated) in various media. To cite just a few examples: Prudhomme, Marx, Legere, Chaplin, Brazil , McLuhan and Ellul. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “Today, we measure out our lives with coffee spoons.” Following IR…DR, the Digital Revolution. Consider the massive change in communication that has occurred since ‘I’ invented the internet. E-mail, Text, Excel, PowerPoint have all changed the way we express our thoughts…and therefore how and what we think. Begin with the obliteration of orthography (spelling) and grammar, the atrophy of sentence structure, the disappearance of complex verb forms, and, of course, the rise of internet slang and emojis. We’ve witnessed the reduction of mathematics to spread sheeting and rhetoric to bullet points. When PowerPoint first came out, I was resistant. I didn’t like the oversimplification and non-sequiturs I noticed in others’ work products. I wouldn’t use it…until I couldn’t not use it. Now, of course, I use it every day. “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Now we appear to be riding on the first swell of another technological tidal wave: first language, writing, manufacture, computerization, and now…(drum roll please) Artificial Intelligence. All of which brings us back to what I found so terrifying : “…thinking like the AI.” We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential, of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…but that may be exactly what we’re doing…which leads me to my second concern: “Generate five innovative product ideas.” Talk about begging the question. Can AI truly innovate? That may be the dominant intellectual question of our time; but according to the quote at the beginning of this article, it’s already a settled matter of fact: AI can innovate! If so, we need to consider our Bots conscious …and therefore entitled to certain civil rights; if not, we need to consider how far we’ve dumbed-down our understanding of innovation . Implicit in ‘in/nova/tion’ is ‘novum’, new. Rearranging deck chairs is not new, but I don’t doubt that AI can do it brilliantly. That’s not the same thing as inventing a new, iceberg-proof hull. On the other hand, where do we draw the line? When does mere novelty become true innovation? Is there any fundamental difference? What a time to be alive! We are at the ‘question forming’ stage of a new anthropological era. Should aquatic organisms colonize dry land? The Iron Age is history; welcome to the Age of Bots. I can’t wait to see where we go from here! 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 . Share Previous Next

< Back Be a Bee Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! David Cowles I owe the better insights (below) to Rabbi Aharon Loschak of Brooklyn, N.Y. For those that are ‘not so good,’ I take full responsibility: Small businesses in the United States are increasingly organized as pass-through entities, i.e., they pass net business income straight to their owners or investors. (Marx’s worst nightmare!) As a result, only these individuals—and not the entity itself—are taxed on the revenues. 95 percent of U.S. businesses are pass-throughs, but this isn’t about tax codes! Toward the end of his days, Moses tells the Jewish people that they are about to enter the land promised to their forefathers (the Patriarchs) ... a land flowing with milk and honey. Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! A bee’s primary function is to pollinate flowers, collect nectar, and make honey. It’s no exaggeration to say that honeybees make the world go round. On the other hand, honeybees are also famous for their stingers. Just ask any dad, two steps ahead of his own child, as both run out of the park, terror-stricken by a buzz. Parents tell their children that bees are largely harmless because they only use their stingers in self-defense. Unless they feel threatened, they will not strike first. Just stand still, mind your own business, and chances are you’ll be fine. Chances are …cold comfort indeed! But point taken: the bee is only concerned with making honey and will only use its stinger when something gets in the way of that goal. Like the bee, we are also tasked with collecting sweet things. Like the bee, we have a mission: assemble the materials of life, carefully ensuring that those materials are renewable, of course, and then build the City of Dioce ( Read " Ectaban " here. ) , i.e., make them into something luscious. Never forget who you are in the process of life. You are ‘bee,’ so ‘be bee’ with every ounce of your bee-ing! If something interferes with or threatens your mission, i.e., you, it may be stinger time …but only as an act of self-defense. Self -defense? Yup, your mission is who you are. You are what you were sent to do. Anything that threatens your mission threatens you. To defend your mission is to defend yourself. Notice I didn’t say, “defend your property.” Your property is not you! Your mission, on the other hand, is – it’s your seat in the world. Without property, you are still you; without a mission, you are not: Contendo ergo sum. You are, but you are in the context of an actual world. Your mission is your seat in that world. Without that seat, there is an unbridgeable chasm between you and the world…which means there is no you. So, defend your mission, defend yourself; build the city, make honey! (That’s the principle behind Judeo-Christian martyrdom…but let’s not go there …yet.) Consider the special place of honey in Jewish dietary practices: though it’s secreted from a non-kosher animal, it’s still kosher. This is in stark contrast to the rule that “all secretions from a non-kosher entity are also not kosher.” The Talmud explains that honey isn’t really a secretion from the bee’s body because the bee is a pass-through entity . As such, the honey retains its botanical quality and so is fit for kosher consumption. In other words, it’s not about you; it’s about your mission. You are on a mission and the fate of the created universe rests on that mission. You are obeying Kant’s Categorical Imperative: you do what all must do in order for all this to be all this. You are also honoring the message of St. Paul to the Christian community at Ephesus: “For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” (Eph. 2: 10) As with the calling of Jeremiah, God makes it clear that it’s all about the mission. First the mission, then the missionary. No missionary without a mission. The potential for ‘bumper-sticking’ is endless. All of this ties in with the question of identity, a persistent theme in ATM. “ Who are you ?” the Caterpillar asked. On one hand, you are Alice, a little girl with a very fertile imagination. On another hand, you are a bee, popping islands of honey (order) into an unbounded sea of disorder (entropy). Everything you think is you is not you: your body, your personality, your education, your possessions, your upbringing, etc. Everything you think is not you is you: how you transform the world, how you inject order into chaos, how you act as a missionary on behalf of the Kingdom of God. 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