Showing posts with label Phil-aphorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Phil-aphorism. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2024

Aphorism of the Day, March 2024

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2024

With language we have come to explore the behaviors of the world towards us in the continual development of natural laws.  One could say the articulation of such natural laws is the languaged projection upon the world which confronts us and it is the expression of the covenant of the total environment toward us.  Even without invoking the name of God, we can accept that we project upon the All a covenant relationship in terms of what it promises to us.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2024

God's omnipresence might best be understood as human being possessed with language ability and from this ability projecting words upon everything else even using like everything else as a negligible.  If something does escape language, we cannot know it except by language declaring a mysterious state of escaping language.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2024

Everyone is called to be priestly in that all our lives are lived as offered.  We become priestly through intentionally offering our lives as belonging in solidarity with all.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2024

Noted contrast.  The Ides of March is the death of Julius Caesar who was also a declared god.  The death of Jesus in contrast is remembered by a continuously reconstituted group of followers who changed a historical event into a spiritual process as seen in the Pauline confession, "I have been crucified with Christ."  Is anyone saying, "I have died with Julius Caesar?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2024

The writer of Jeremiah wrote about a new covenant of the law being written upon the heart.  This new covenant is appropriated by New Testament writers as the law of Spirit accessible to everyone.  In practice there often seems to be a disconnect between Spirit and the people who are channeling this Spirit.  Can Spirit be the overcoming of the continuous deconstruction which happens in language use?

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2024

Language is used by people to constitute their identity within contexts.  Biblical language was generated to constitute the identity of people in various places regarding a "transcendental," or a mystery of how promulgated values regarded to be superlative could reconfigure the inner language of people and result in behaviors which are consistent with the superlative values.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2024

In a metaphor, the words of Jesus compares a seed which dies and becomes a plant with what will happen to him.  Does the plant have continuity with the seed from which it came?  Indeed, but it is noticeably different.  The post-death state of Jesus and everyone is quite different.  In the case of Jesus, some people got to experience Risen Christ appearances.  In the case of our departed loved ones, it remains mostly not yet in such appearances, save for memories, dream apparitions, and our mourning as proof that our loved one was indeed here.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2024

Preachers most often use the Gospels as eye-witness accounts, whereas the writing provenance of the Gospels make them more about the issues of the early Jesus Movement communities encoded in narratives about Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2024

If those who have died are lucky they don't escape being in the language of the thoughts of the memories re-manifested in those who knew them, and perhaps even in those who didn't.  Who knows where the energy concrescence of selfhood goes and travels and in what varied forms?

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2024

Some would like to "escape" language by pretending that silence or any human life expression or activity could be known without first assuming language.

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2024

To blame a politician for being political is like blaming a fish for being in water.  The question is "for what polis" does a politician speak and legislate?   Is it for a true common good, for the largest number of people, or is it for only a local tribe?

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2024

Meaning is the differentiation of value that a person has learned within their community to place upon the events which occur to them.  Meaning is not final because in time meanings create and give birth to new variations in meaning.  Therefore finality in meaning cannot be fixed.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2024

The present brings into existence a new past in how the past is assessed.  The past can only be dealt with from the now because we cannot be anywhere else.  History is the practice of anachronism since we cannot avoid import our questions from life now onto the historical traces which we have received.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2024

The appearance of writing was magical in that it could be the trace of someone actually speaking without being there.  The appearance of writing created orality since when only orality existed, it is not known as such because it is not yet contrasted with having writing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2024

Reading the Bible not about reading eye witness accounts of things which could be empirically verifiable, it is about appreciating the symbolic codes used for scribal leaders (the Bible is writing) to promote community identity as that identity related to the highest values of the community, which in the case of the early Christians was the mystagogy of the Risen "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2024

With language a person is trying to manifest the connection of everything that is within oneself with everything that is outside of one epidermis and sensory portals.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2024

The Bible is a collection of writings which were preserved and elevated to a place of community importance instantiated by the legacy of values which readers perceived and deemed worthy of promulgating and passing on to the next generation.  Within the entire universe of existing texts now, the biblical writings get evaluated among the vast amount of world knowledge.  The quantity of world knowledge necessarily changes the place and value and functional use of all previous literature, and the Bible too is subject to constantly being seen differently in the expansion of the universe of knowledge.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2024

Writing and speaking can only be done in a fragmentary way since what we say and write is a miniscule  portion of the possible linguistic universe of everything which might come to language.  What we say and write is also imprisoned by the particular paradigms in which we find ourselves located.  We at all times should humbly admit that there is a great MORE universe of language which can dissolve our miniscule language efforts leaving our language constructs deconstructed by greater contexts.  The fact of the smallness of our language products being dissolved by existing within a great MORE, should not diminish our efforts to make them comply with what we regard to be highest, namely, what love and justice in word and deed can mean within our limited contexts.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Aphorism of the Day, February 2024

Aphorism of the Day, February 29, 2024

Being spiritual in the New Testament refers to a habit of wisdom which allows one to read the world in a different way than the merely literal way.  It is a more aesthetic way of viewing the world, which does not contradict empirical verification.  The New Testament writers ask that the substantiality of other ways of perceiving the world be accepted with the respect which we have for "believing our eyes."  Poetry and science can co-exist with each mode receiving it proper use.

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2024

One of the subtexts of the Gospel of John is that spiritual discourse is figurative and not "literal" discourse.  Repeatedly in John's Gospel, the writer mocks the crassly literal.

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2024

The purpose of the law can be viewed in various ways.  Laws can be the insight of actuarial wisdom to recommend best behavioral practices for the goals of the common good of the particular group for which the rules are to be applied.  Laws can be view with the penal outcome in mind to deter bad behaviors.  Laws can become legalism when imposed structuration is applied to manifold areas of life and the relative importance of certain laws can be lost.  Picking up dog poop rules can attain the equal status of how one treats one's neighbor.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2024

A chief task in life is the orchestration in the use of discourse.  When to use what kind of discourse when we are articulating values in word and deed and when we are interpreting the values which arrive to us in the texts, words, and deeds of other.  To to be confused in the use of discourse results in at best comedy, but at worst in human cruelty.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2024

Ever notice how there is profound outrage for new events of oppression while the populace have been inured to situations of continuing oppression, as if, such were more acceptable?  Is common life about learning to live with the tacit hypocrisy of our own country and people while getting righteously outraged when we think we can see it in people who are not us?

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2024

Being located with space and time limitation feeds into the ease of liking what we know and knowing what we like.  If charity begins at home, it is too easy to only practice charity to those with whom we are familiar.  To believe in a God of all means that we are constantly challenge to love beyond our natural borders.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2024

Taking up of one's cross was a symbolic mystagogic phrase of the early church.  It did not mean that one should seek capital punishment in the Roman Empire situation; it meant, using the phrase of St. Paul, "being crucified with Christ," as a spiritual method of identity with this interior higher power source to motivate repentance, or the getting better today than yesterday.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2024

The dying of states of becoming in time results in the birth of what comes after.  The death and birthing of states of the mind is the meaning of repentance in the Gospel.  The words of Jesus refer to the death of the soul life pseuche in order to experience the continual salvation of the "after life," or the birth of a more excellent orientation of one's inner life toward love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2024

In our time, the way in which one can be absolved of not having love or empathy, is to refer to love and empathy as being "woke."  If one can highlight the fact that people who attempt love and empathy are sometimes preaching a standard that they themselves cannot perfectly keep, then they are "woke," and so no one should be woke.  The attempt to be empathetic and practice justice toward people who are struggling to be honest about personal identities that are unfamiliar to other people is regarded to be "woke" and therefore something bad.  The practice of justice is to find supporting ways for all persons to know the pursuit of well-being and happiness.  The common good has to include justice for those who are regarded to be minorities, which is simply a statistical designation.

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2023

In the words of Jesus, pain and suffering cannot be excluded from the experience of the messiah or God.  God encompasses the full range of probability necessary for the kind of freedom needed for moral authenticity.  It is oddly true that we have to be able at our human worst to authenticate the value at choosing to be our best.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2024

The Gospels present in story form the disagreement about the messiah which existed within the synagogue and Jesus Movement.  Peter's misunderstanding of what was to happen to the messiah instantiates that disagreement.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2024

Everything arises within the field of what probably will happen according to how happening is defined and interpreted because we have language.  Probability is a designation of what may happen in time by language users.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2024

The life of probabilities is the life of freedom of not knowing the future as actual and not have certainty about outcomes requires from us continuous actuarial wisdom.  Such is based upon, given our observations of what has happened, how can we be prepared for the likely happenings in the future.  We need to be practical statisticians at all times, even without knowing statistic formulas. 

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2024

Since we don't always voluntarily chose extended fasts or periods of discipline, the intent behind the church offering the discipline of the season of Lent is to do it together.  Our special disciplines may be primarily private, but there are also corporate disciplines which we do together as a community.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2024

Before we knew about atoms and the sub-atomic, we thought perhaps particles of dust and ashes were the smallest things which human flesh could be reduced. Humanity has longed believed in the invisible sub-microscopic using words like heart, spirit, soul, and inner being.  Language itself is mostly invisible though it has it wordy effects in what we say, write, and act out in our body language.  It is in fact with our invisible aspect of language that we come to have our identities because people in every culture know themselves beings who give names to everything.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2024

When one wants to learn something new, it often requires a change of one's normal schedule to devote time for the new learning goal.  Such is what the season of Lent is about.  Just view it as rearranging one's previous allocation of time to devote to further excellence in how one can better practice love and justice with others.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2024

The presentation of Jesus in his temptation ordeal was to highlight the need for an experience of a higher power to win the interior struggles which vary for everyone because of the specifics of one's nature and nurture.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2024

Temptation is both a general and specific reality.  How so?  Temptation is essentially about timing and mistiming in what we do and say, and a general vocation in life is to be in right timing with our impulse control so that "God's will" can be done on earth through us.  Temptation is a specific reality in that there are periods of time when the struggle is what we might call an ordeal and the inner forces of accusation seem to say we can't have self control.  The life of Jesus is presented with a period of specific ordeals for him to achieve the timing of his life mission.  But the general presentation of Jesus' life is about him doing things in God's time.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2024

Light is a metaphor for the conversion moment in embracing a new paradigm and changing one's thought orientation in the world with attending behavioral changes as well.

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2024

Consider language as an inner kaleidoscope with words as the "colored sherds" to be shone through and projected as meaning in our lives.  The words have both randomness the feature of arbitrary selection but with structured limitations due to rules of syntax and grammar.

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2024

With incredible reflexivity in language and by language, we arrive at our identity as language users, and through language we name the interior ability to shuffle words in communicative patterns.  Our life of knowing is having awareness of being within language reflexive being.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2024

The power of words within us includes the naming of the retaining of words in the phenomenon of memory.  With memory the words within us also get associated with seeing things in the exterior world and the interior picture words have the ability to double expose and create fantasia which is not possible in the external limitation.  This is what happens with dreams and interior or visionary seeing.  This does not clash with science because science has a discourse proper to itself and visionary seeing has its own discourse.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2024

Visionary seeing as experiences of the sublime occur because one's interior life, which is really an inner linguistic lens through which one perceives the world, causes one to see the exterior world in an enhanced different, "enlightened" way.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2024

With the travel among the people in various locales of Jesus Movement communities one could say that there was something of social osmosis in the spread of theology.  A worthy study is to look at the expressions of mystagogy in St. Paul, who wrote before the Gospel writings, and see how such mystagogy became the narrative of Jesus as a parable to provide an origin discourse for practices of the early Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2024

Infancy narratives, baptism, transfiguration, resurrection are the butterfly moments in the metamorphosis in the presentation of the life of Jesus.  Surely the narrative was the mystagogy of the early Christ-communities who taught an identity with the Risen Christ involving a continuous metamorphosis in spiritual experience.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2024

The most basic medicine for health is food.  So to be food healthy, first one must have enough.  The first food people eat is the food of one's family and culture.  Some people are worried about getting any food at all whereas the prosperous are worried about the amount and kinds of food they eat.  Bread from heaven should be interior words which change people's actions to make sure that everyone in the world has enough to eat.  The piety of Eucharist without reference to those who are hungry, may be a pointless piety.

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2024

Does folk medicine work?  It does if the ill and their society perceive a better outcome than alternatives even while the big illness of death to which all of us are headed only get some temporary delays.  Life and Death are part of holistic natural cycle, except in our meaningful living interaction with life and people we get helplessly attached and so we cannot regard death to be but part of the cycle of becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2024 

The folk meteorology of Ground Hog's Day co-exists with modern meteorology as well as the dated traditions of the Farmer's Almanac.  People can switch between the discourses of folk traditions and science without problem.  People should also be able to switch between the folk biblical traditions and science too.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2024

The creative advances in science and technology have changed the thought environments.  How has medical science changed the discussion of reproductive rights?  How did orality come to be known after writing provided a different kind of technology of memory, since it could only be known once a contrast arose.  Cultures with writing can no longer know what orality means without already having textual practice.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Aphorism of the Day, January 2024

Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2024

While we may hold that the laws of science were essentially the same in biblical times as they are now, we cannot assume the sameness regarding cultural and social practice.  We don't criticize the people of the past for being different that we are in our understanding of social justice for more people, but we don't valorized ancient biblical social practices as being an absolute standard for all times.  The cultural manifestations of justice have changed as we have become aware of some primary identities of people.  Does anyone think that Jesus today would tell parables about servants and slaves?

Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2024

Salvation is holistic health and when one looks at the healing stories in the Gospel, one should do it as a historical medical anthropologists.  Healing arts are contextual the accounts of cures are many on this side of death.  Of course, the Gospel believe that the big sickness of death does get "cured" eventually.

Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2024

The Plenitude of All is only experienced locally.  From having location one assumes that ones can be everywhere and when one adds language to being everywhere, one has personalized the world because language is personal.  With language we label non-personal things, extra-personal entities in personal ways.  Language does not let us escape personal-morphic practice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2024

How does humanity ascribe superlative value?  By saying something is superhuman or above human or out of this world.  One can understand how the divine enter human discourse.  We say that things are "out of this world," while remaining very much in it.  Religions present systems of axiology (values) and have hyperbolic discourse to represent the highest values.  Please do not confuse scientific language and the language of religion.

Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2024

Everyone is necessarily a "relativist" because one can only see and know in part, that is, the things relative to ones time and place.  However, all relativists use discourses of totality because in using language one assumes the entire linguistic universe of differences without be able to comprehend the totality.  Any relativist is always already committed to the absolute reality of there always being MORE.

Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2024

Is Being the absolute abstracted past of everything that has become?  The now is new arising occasions being made into inclusive Being.  Our freedom repertoire may be limited in how we contribute to new occasions, but it is significant if we choose to creatively advance love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2024

Some people absolutize the ancient human awareness models of the Bible to support the refusal to offer justice, rights, and care to people whose personal identities differ from "cookie cutter" binary modes of understanding the human person.  The Bible models many creative advances and paradigm shifts, which means we should also know how to integrate change with justice and dignity for all peoples.

Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2024

It is impossible to avoid discourses of totality since when we speak we assume the entire universe of discourse even though we are limited in the portion which we can actually use.  We should not mistake the use of the discourse of totality for actually comprehending it or presuming to know its meaning.  Stated simply, the discourse of totality is the fact that "there is MORE" is the always already reality.

Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2024

The supreme insult in philosophy is to call someone a "relativist."  Yet anyone can only know what is relative to one's circumstance and time of living.  It is more presumptuous to be the one who is an "absolutist" and claim to speak exclusively on behalf of the absolute while having but a relative profile.  Wisdom would demand that like St. Paul we confess that we know in part and that everyone uses a discourse of totality in assuming the entire universe while but actually using but a paltry portion of it.  The vastness of life demands being humble relativists, but let's do our relative parts well, in love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2024

Having language is interiority; language comes from within.  It is a within which becomes an exterior in sound and text on its way to awakening the interior language points of new language users.

Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2024

Interpreters error when they try to force a correspondence between ancient cultural practices in biblical times to our current day.  Some ancient cultural practices can be recommended as a model for us today, while some ancient cultural practices are rightfully regarded as unworthy of justice.  See slavery and the subjugation of women.  Some interpreters pick and choose in arbitrary ways which ancient cultural "biblical" practices they want to retain as models for our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2024

Wisdom in life involves knowing justice as something which is permanent among changes.  Being permanent does not mean that application of justice to people in current situation doesn't change.  When people's self awareness change, the apparent nature of justice seems to change, but justice does not change, only the application of it to people previously denied justice changes.

Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2024

It is said that Inuit have more than fifty words for snow, which have come from their close interaction with the many varieties of snow.  For ages biblical interpreters have assumed that human beings are or should be "cookie cutter" binary or male and female.  As honesty has been allow on observing who people are and how they speak about their own identity, the binary typology is no longer accurate to the diversity that is present.  New words arise to speak about this diversity, and we discover that people are more comfortable with a variety of words for snow than they are with a variety of descriptions of how people know themselves to "human."  People have a sentient existence quite different from snow which means sentient people should strive for empathy.

Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2024

Being a conservative is basically a relationship to time and change and the pace in which one is able to integrate innovation in one's life to respond to new social understanding of what is happening in the ecological and the social environments.  Conserving may include lots of nostalgia.

Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2024

Jesus brought the pronounced "fatherization" of God, not because the Divine can be limited to the masculine but rather to teach the divine familization of all people based upon being created in the image of God.

Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2024

Those who think that America should be a theocracy miss the genius of the founders who set up a system that was designed to keep Christians from persecuting other Christians with whom they disagreed.  Thou shalt have freedom of religious belief, but thou shalt not and the government shalt not burn Christians at the stake for not having the "established and correct" Christianity.

Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2024

The story of Jonah is a satire on theocratic patriotism.  Jonah was angered when God told him that the same love he assumed God had for his people was also available to the foreigners of Nineveh.  It is a warning to anyone who thinks that God's love is exclusively "exceptional" to any group of people.  One can feel thankfully "favored" as long as one allows that everyone else can also know that same favor.

Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2024

Seeing is actually a language or text in "pictures." Picto-syntax and picto-grammar in nature because language co-exists with seeing.

Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2023

What is seen is like word creating what we call vision of objects.  From our interior lives we are able to project holographic images as well and so dream-like angels appear as do unicorns, dragons, and fauns.

Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2024

Jesus is Word and Ladder in the first chapter of John.  The "dream ladder" in reference to Jacob.  In short, Jesus the Christ is the metaphor for word as the communicative essence of human existence being evidence of what is divine or superlative about human identity.

Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2024

Among the many obvious "I am" statements of Jesus in John's Gospel, we should also add an unobvious one.  To Nathaniel Jesus said he/Son of Man was the (Jacob's) ladder from heaven on whom whom the angels would go up and down.  Being in John 1, Christ as Word is the connecting ladder between what comes from profound interiority and what words become in the "external" world, i.e., the world exterior to what is inside of us.  Angels are specific messenger words manifest upon the Word as the connecting ladder of interior and exterior.

Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2024

Some people only perform "under the lights," and crumble in the too ordinary conditions of drudgery.  Though there may be a difference between practice and performance the rote of practice is required for the attaining of lyricism in performance.

Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2024

The "call" of God is the discover of particular purpose among general purpose.  If everything has an inherent purpose, the discover of particular purpose for a specific person might be descriptive of what "call" of God means.

Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2024

Constitutional originals and biblical fundamentalists can be inconsistent in how they use the principles of meaningfulness in ancient texts and meanings which clearly are relative to ancient and former cultural practices which were made "true" by sheer  widespread practice.  Fundamentalists will oppose gay relationships based upon Leviticus writings while forsaking the restrictions on pork and the stoning of insolent children, as well a seeing it very cultural appropriate to now condemn slavery.  Constitutional originalists are not very original when they don't limit bearing of arms to 18th century muskets.  Such convenient and fickle casuistry is done for other motives than for justice and safety for actual people.  They use "fidelity" to the founding documents to avoid and prohibit the application of justice and safety.

Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2024

Language is ritualistic in that we cannot help but repeat patterns of word order for specific hierarchical value purpose in any given moment.  Language users are repetitive for the sake of their values.

Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2024

Because something if finally discovered does not make it suddenly it more true than it was before it was discovered.  That things unfold in the history of discovery does not change the always already.  Things can be always already in possibility before becoming actual in experience.  However, possibility should not diminish the significance of the actual, if the actual is creative advance toward goodness and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2024

In the attempt to remove words from one's life, one has to use and assume words to do so and overlook that one's body language and environment are already pre-coded by language in the effort to "forget worded existence" and also by using the words "forget worded existence."  There is no escape from language.

Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2024

Lots of people who say they don't believe in ritualistic efficacy belie this with their own endless repetitions that indicate a degree of irrationality.  Lots of religious people  believe in a kind of ritual magic and divorce the sacraments from anthropological soundness.

Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2024

Interpretation is the art of creating new traces in language for the future by sorting through the inherited memorial traces available to the interpreter.  It is an illusory art of being tricked to think that we attain contact with a "real something" instead of the shuffling of traces within language.  We can build a hierarchy of values based upon characterizing the "real something," and such hierarchical values may be a way of saying, "my community is the best," or the real something might be an interpretation in body language of what love and justice means in practice.  Choose today your interpretation of "real something."  My community is better than yours or my humble attempt to instantiate a vision of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2023

Ritual is the stylized and community performance of repetition involving words and gestures which encapsulate important community values to be perpetuated for continuing and new members initiated into community practices.

Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2024 (Feast of the Holy Name)

Language and Naming is the human attempt to preserve identity across time.  Time means that everything is changing and we can observe that the human body eventually breaks down and is integrated with what surrounds its molecular composition.  If the body cannot retain its identity as singular throughout time, how can personhood?  Naming is the hope of attaining continuity in identity throughout time.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Faith in America

Faith in America

January 16, 2024

In light of the encroachment of Americans who want to end the American practice of the separation of church and state, it is time to articulate more clearly and directly faith in America, not faith as being an adherent of one of the religious faith communities of  our country, but rather faith in the founding ideals of our system itself.

Why articulate faith in America among faiths in theistic Being or beings?  I would like to promote the similarity between faith in American and having faith in God or some other systems of holistic lifestyle practices.  I would begin this study of similarity by noting what is common in the New Testament word for faith, and the classical Greek word for persuasion found in Aristotle's Rhetoric.  The New Testament koine Greek word for faith is pistis.  The classical Greek word for persuasion is also pistis.  One of the goals of rhetoric is persuasion whether in politics, law, artistic speech, or public speaking events such as funeral discourse/eulogies.  The contexts in the way Aristotle used pistis and the way in which pistis is used in the New Testament are centuries apart but what is common is the notion of persuasion.  The New Testament writers defined their lives as having faith in Jesus Christ, and it could be synonymous to say that the New Testament writers were persuaded about Jesus Christ and the messages which attended his witness in the tradition derived from him.

I would like to promote faith in America as being persuaded about certain ideals of formation and identity as a country which originated in the experience of our founders and how those ideals were articulated in our founding documents.

The founders were aware of the practice of religious faith in England and on the Continent.  They were aware of how religious faith was established in the monarchies which made those who did not embrace the established religious faith non-conformists and less than equal in their rights within society.

The founders of our country proposed a persuasion about political practice which would prevent any person losing their rights and privileges as a free citizen because of their practice or non-practice of any particular religious belief.

The evidence of competing Christians harming each other, even to discrimination, persecution and the burning of heretics at the stake, was evidence of the consistent failure in practice of what one might call Christian charity.  The founders of our country proposed a political system of persuasion to referee among Christians who often fought with each other, but also a system to protect anyone of any system of persuasion.  The requirement of the founders in our political system was that our citizenry live according to laws which tolerated the differences in religious beliefs and other systems of persuasion.

In our time, we need to shore up the refereeing function intended by the founders of our system of political persuasion, and indeed we need to be renewed in our faith in America. 

January 17, 2024

The persuasion about American ideals that our founders proposed was informed by the influences of the Enlightenment with a dependence on reason for the practical governance of community.  The Enlightenment with an emphasis on reason gave the founders a different kind of discourse, a discourse which is more scientific or social scientific discourse than a religious discourse.  Just as the Enlightenment resulted in a more poignant division between the discourses of science and religion, so the American founders proposed a legal system a rule of law which would be freed from specific religious judgment criteria while being committed to impartial observations, observations which might be enjoined by people of all persuasions.  The discourse of faith in America, or persuasion about our ideals, is a discourse which admits/invites the discourse of people of religious persuasion to the conversation, but the American founders assumed that our government does not deliberate because of a specific religious faith, even though the values of justice might be the similar in any faith tradition.

Often interfaith groups in our country gather for local community benefit and participation in many things.  They gather not to try to convince each other to believe and pray the same; they gather to share what might be call orthopraxy, that is right practice of justice and charity within the community on which they agree.

One might say that the founders of America wanted us in a similar way to be a system of orthopraxy, that is, a system of right justice for our diverse citizenry.

January 19, 2024

As dignity for the states of being has come to awareness as to who deserves rights and inclusion in the equal benefits of human community, the power groups of community have been slow to to recognize and share rights and inclusion of many to the full privilege of membership.

How many religious denominations have been separating because of women, gay, lesbian, transgendered people wanting full inclusion?  The Holy Book interpretations, doctrine, and practice of many religious groups set a limit on the acceptance of persons with unchosen human conditions of being and even designate them as "sinful."

Some religious communities believe that the practice of persuasion about God and Christ needs to be inclusive of persons who discover themselves in unchosen states of being that still allow them to make vows of love and justice consistent with the love which Jesus showed to those who wanted to always be better and yet who were not given acceptance within religious community.

In a similar way our faith in our American system is being threatened with division, even civil war, by persons who do not think that they can tolerate the level of diversity which our citizenry is now presenting to us.  Many Americans seem to want a white, male, controlled society with a certain kind of Christian control.  They would return white males to seeming paternalistic roles on behalf of women, and minority groups.  In paternalistic practice, those who have the control by law, wealth, and power make the decisions on behalf of their version of a diverse society.

Having faith in American should mean being persuaded about a dynamic political system which is able to integrate the arising in awareness of the diversity of people who are now living within our borders.  Faith in America should be dynamic process to include and expedite the ideal expression of justice for all within our border.  Hence, faith in America has to be known as a refereeing faith among other faiths, especially religious faith communities which have a history of poor treatment of those with whom they disagree.  A single religious faith community cannot be the established faith community to negotiate among the other expressions of faith in our country.

January 20, 2024

As brilliant as our founding documents of our country are, the writers of these documents did not believe that they were final.  The documents themselves prescribe Congress as a legislative body to perform the continuous work of law making.  This means that faith in America requires the continuous work of articulating what is permanent about our ideals into the changing contexts of our American life.  If being originalist about our Constitution and Declaration of Independence meant the retaining of the cultural practices from which these document derived, it would be original to still practice slavery, not allow women to vote, and allow only muskets as valid arms to be permitted.  No one is naive enough to be strict originalists so as to assert that we maintain the exact cultural practices from which the founding document derived.  Being American is not like being Amish in trying to freeze cultural practices and technology to the cultural practices and technology of one "model" period in history.

Part of the wisdom of incorporating change in the America experience of justice has to do with creative advance in self-awareness.  What self-awareness often reveals is our hypocrisy, that is, the discovery that our ideals proclaimed have not/are not being lived up to in actual practice.  Where has America had to learn painful lessons of self-awareness?  We have had to admit that all "men" being created equal did not apply to women, native peoples, black Americans, and more recently people who have understood their gender identities different from binary or heterosexual designation.

As diversity increases within our populace and as collective minorities gain voting power, there is fear of the eroding of the dominant influence of the once privileged group.  As the popular vote can no longer guarantee the privilege of those who once controlled the political situation, there has been a retreat by some from democratic ideals to a proposal that our Constitutional democracy actually means that constitutional governing bodies can overturn the results of election.

Faith in America means that we can embrace new self-awareness which exposes our hypocrisy of the past in living up to our ideals of justice for all who are created equal.

January 21, 2024

The thesis of this writing is that "faith in America" is insightful about our political way of life.  By faith, I mean being persuaded about the founding ideals of our country that still lack achieving of what might be referred to as a perfect union.  Our hope is to be at the work of becoming a more perfect union, and such perfection in this union would mean a practice of common good which provides equal justice for all who are participants in this union.

By faith, I have harkened back to the New Testament work for faith, which in Aristotle's Rhetoric meant persuasion.  (pistis = persuasion). I have posited that our American founders proposed a political lifestyle to referee among the many persuasions in our lives.  Why do we need such a referee?  Because when our religious faith persuasion do not end up being universally persuasive, there has been the tendency for people of religious faith out of pride and fear of rejection of their cherished truths, to be prejudice toward, persecute, harm, or even kill people who do not practice allegiance to their faith perspective.  Our founder proposed being persuaded about a system of community interaction which involved having faith in a refereeing process for the many persuasions which people have in their lives.

I would argue for the benefit of faith in America as a refereeing or regulatory faith among the other persuasions of our lives, ones which if are not regulated can end up with the persecution of people who are are not persuaded.  To try to establish the Christian faith or any religious faith as the established faith of the government is to end in the persecution of members of the populace who cannot freely enjoin themselves to such an established religion.

In proposing defining faith as persuasion, I am casting faith as a definite rhetorical function.  And I would argue that faith in America involves rhetorical function, one of which is regulatory because it involves the generation of laws to fulfill the ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by all participants in this collectivity which we call a Union, or the United States.

As humans we exist within a rhetorical field, that is, we are constituted by the ways in which we have come to use language.  We express ourselves in language in different ways, and these ways of expression might be called discursive practices.  The various discursive practices which we use might have something in common with what Wittgenstein called "language games," in that they are practices within language which have their own specific rules.  We can name some of these discursive practices which have rules that pertain to their practice: religious discourse, philosophical discourse, juridical discourse, political discourse, psychological discourse, social discourse, ethics, and a vast array of aesthetic discourses such as prose, poetry, theatre, cinema, and music.   We cannot avoid embodied language, "word made flesh" expression of language, or the body language which represents actions with intended purpose and meanings.  We cannot avoid that our actions and the environments that we live in are completely coded with predesignated meanings because we use language and are choreographed by the ways in which we have taken on the language of our lives.

The American founders in their deliberations and attending documents are asking that each American for the purposes of attaining a more perfect union, check their others faith egos at the door, not for the purposes of their abandoning their own spiritual and religious lives, but for the specific purpose of living together in most adequate ways for the common good of all people.

Our religious faith egos are the most difficult ones to surrender.  What can claim to be more expansive than the divine?  How can having a faith in God, play second fiddle to faith in America as a most adequate way of living together?  Such would seem to diminish one's faith in God by a practice giving preference to faith in America over one's specific faith in God.  People who often oppose their faith in God to faith in America do so using an appeal to civil disobedience and they might cry like the evangelists in the Acts of the Apostles, "we have to serve God rather than man."  People who make that claim also have to be honest about the Gospel wherein Jesus is not presented as a person who is opposing the Roman Government authorities.  He is quoted as saying "render unto Caesar the things that belong to Caesar...."  St. Paul as a member of two religious minority groups in the Roman Empire, as a Jewish follower of Jesus, enjoined his church members to pray for the authorities, even as being ordained or established by God.  Apparently Jesus and Paul both knew how to be religiously faithful, and still be participants in a political system which did not establish their faith perspective as the official religion.

People of religious faith can have conflicting consciences on specific issues within the American system without having the Christian religion or any religion be established as the required religion of America.

Another insight to arrive at in the midst of dilemmas of conscience and apparent contradiction is the insight about the human person being a multi-discursive being.  Each discourse has its own rules and when one conflates rules which pertain to a specific discourse confusion, and conflict can arise.  If one tries to use the rules of chess in the game of checkers, confusion arises.  If one tries to treat poetic imagery as though it were empirically verifiable occurrences, then conflict, absurdity, and comedy can result.

The faith in America or being persuade about our American ideals means that one can be a multi-discursive faith being, having multiple kinds of persuasive practices in the many different discursive practices of our lives. The faith in America proposed by our founders asks of us a wise and mature multi-discursive mental and psychological soundness.  The ideals of our American faith persuasion allows us to be a poet, a scientist, an eye-witness reporter, night dreamers, day dreamers, religious, and much, much more because we are asked to act and be toward the common good.  Faith in America encourages us to keep our personal faiths personal and individual and practiced in families and smaller communities so long as they do not harm or injure the common good.

This of course sounds simplistic and we know that defining the common good is the continual process of justice in our quest of becoming a more perfect union.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Aphorism of the Day, December 2023

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2023

Our calendar way of being in this world imposes an arbitrary last day of the year revealing that we need time-lapsed stories to hang the meaning of our lives on.  Language reduces the morass of the infinite into timed stories.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2023

One of unavoidable things which all can agree on is that everyone has language.  The issue is how we use language in being persuaded about things.  Being persuaded is "having faith," and everyone is persuaded about the things, the ideas, which motivate their lives.  Jesus came to reinforce persuasions about loving God, loving our neighbors, and loving self as the best persuasions to have.  If we can balance loving our neighbors with loving ourselves from a regard of the horizon of God, we will seek a just place for everything and everyone in life.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2023

The world of having language, also has the experience of silence, not to pretend that we never had words, but to create the gaps of rests, like the spaces between musical notes.  So such silence is the boundary of differentiation between all things which really share oneness of continuity with each other with only the illusion of contiguity.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2023

I sat down to meditate and contemplate myself into a wordlessness, a cosmic silence, which turned out to be a comic silence when I remembered that everything was always already pre-coded by having had language.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2023

Life is a meaningless void without Word to be the naming ordering phenomenon of language users.  Having language ability brings into known existence everything in human life and as language users we even name what we don't know, by simply using words to designate large portions of infinity as being unknown by us, which probably means they are not within our realm of intimate perceptual control.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2023

In the Beginning was the Word.  Language is the tacit assumption for intuition, consciousness, music, math, thinking, conceiving, enlightenment, dreams, and everything.  Having language retroactively brings everything that is known to exist.  Language is always already hidden within everything that is experienced.  Babies and animals escape language?  Not in the gaze of the language users who make such states known.  Everything/one either actively or passively becomes within language which reflexively gives rise to the self-knowing language user.  So the creation stories (Genesis and John 1:1) posit the divine as the ultimate Language User.

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2023

The Christmas story might be seen as God's shell game in hiding intensive divine presence within a baby so that we might be practiced in finding the divine presence everywhere so that we treat each other and our world with the appropriate reverences of care, love, and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2023

"All theology is anthropology."  Perhaps a phrase from L. Feuerbach.  Another way of saying this is that "no one has an non-human experience of God."  The divine is a mode of relaying the humanly sublime.  So what is revealed in the "Word made flesh" metaphor?  Anthropomorphism is a valid way to come to know what we anthropomorphically say is "beyond human."

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2023

It is unavoidable and unrealistic to deny the greatness of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, even when we don't find specific occasions within the multiverse consistent with love, justice, and personal favor.  Such a view might be one of the insights behind the composition of the Psalms.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2023

Everything is temporal and temporary, including everlastingness.  Our vocation is to be a part of new justice arising in new time.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2023

An insightful way to read the infancy narrative is to find the spiritual encoding of the mystagogy of the early churches which was summarized in the Pauline phrase, "Christ in you, the hope of glory."  How does Christ get in you?  Through an overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2023

Getting to the "real" in Scripture or in anything means sorting through layers of interpretations of memorial traces of memorial traces proving that what is real is the unavoidable always already "sorting of traces."

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2023

With language and time and memory, we are left with linguistic traces about other linguistic traces and some of them attain the status of origin, made so by what has subsequently happened so as to be able to designate a former event as an origin.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2023

People of colonial and "empire" Christianity need to be honest about how to appropriate biblical readings which were mainly generated by and for oppressed.  If the preponderance of Scriptures is ideology on behalf of poor people, then Christians with knowledge, wealth, and power need to quit pretending having an honest identity with the "blessed state of the poor."

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2023

The endless task of the New Testament writers was to try to tell their readers who Jesus was.  They resorted to all the language of surpassing human figures in their vocabulary.  In their loss of what to say, they poetically understood him to be Word itself, and all and in all.  

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2023

Ponder the words serendipity, providence, bad luck, favor, and fortune and analyze one's relation to probability.  What will happen and how will we label it once it has happened, while it is happening but also after it has happened.  A future reassessment of a regarded serendipitous current event may overturn such evaluation.  Time can seemingly alchemize the good into bad and the bad into good and leave lots of so-so as merely so-so.  Is Time really alchemizing anything or is it simply language using interpreters from changing subject positions always already reinterpreting life according to oneself?

 Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2023

Any understand of God has to include ultimate diversity across time.  Wisdom in humanity involves orchestrating diversity for common good.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2023

Old wineskins can't retain the new wine?  The accumulation of more occasion of human experience means that old models cannot handle the diversity.  Churches are splitting because many do not believe the old can handle the diversity of persons who want to belong.  America is polarized because some Americans do not believe our "old" system can handle the diversity of people who want to enjoy equality in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness within our borders.

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2023

The New Testament writers believed the world as they knew it would end.  They believed that such an end would be the realized justice of punishment for the bad guys, even retroactive for the those who had died.  In our time, it is hard for us to visualize a hard end of anything since remnant energy only reconstitute a different future, even if that future is humanless.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2023

John the Baptist identified himself as "the voice."  He was not the Messiah, or Elijah or The Prophet.  As "the voice," he had the role akin to an announcer who is not the main news or the main player, but the one who describes the chief person of the event.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2023

The New Testament is about classifying someone who became famous.  What language was available to speak superlatives about Jesus particularly after he became better known as a spiritual phenomenon.  Terms from religious writings and Roman emperor propaganda were used to write about the comparative greatness of Jesus, who at the time of writing was essentially a inward "spiritual" occurring among those who gathered to know such group effervescence.

  Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2023

The songs of Mary and Zechariah in Luke's Gospel are songs for those in the condition of oppression but they assert the belief in the actions of God in spite of the obvious dire circumstances.  If we ask how it is possible to have faith and optimism when there is no apparent reason, one has to look to the very depth of the grace of awareness itself.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2023

Bible stories involve time-lapsing, or the reduction of thirty plus years of John the Baptist and Jesus into but a few lines.  We cannot know about the unwritten and missing records about John and Jesus.  The few words we have about them stand as what the early Jesus Movement writers wanted us to know about them.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2023

A basic clue to reading the Gospels: when the information about a person like John the Baptist is so sparse, one read less for historical information and more for his functional role in the coming to identity of forming communities who regard Jesus as the inspiring originator.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2023

John the Baptist is presented in the Gospels as a "set up" man for Jesus.  The community of John the Baptist was probably the "proto-church" and the Gospel writers were coaxing members of that community to discover Jesus as the completion of the ministry of John.  John was the water man and Jesus was the Spirit Man.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2023

If the divine image is on all people, shouldn't it be possible for some universal cosmic rising of that image within everyone to convince them of love and justice?   And why doesn't such universal heart conversion by the divine image occur?  Or is it always already occurring and being freely resisted?

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2023

Advent as a season of fasting is a positive fast if normal excess is given to those who have the involuntary fast of daily hunger.


Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2023

In the department of reinventing the wheel, intermittent fasting is a current health and diet recommendation.  Fasting is an important self-control principle of life whose patron saint might be John the Baptist whom we bring out each Advent.  For the addicted, fasting must become permanent even as it must be a continuing discipline in the task of impulse control.  Advent is a season of highlighting fasting.  Meanwhile early Christmas parties tempt us to much too early excess.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2023

The supposed last stage in the grief process is acceptance.  Circumstances force the reality of acceptance as soon as things happen no matter what happens within us when events occur.  The apocalyptic was a literary and preaching mode of accepting that some really bad things are happening when they happen as a way of saying that the God of freedom upholds freedom of things to happen whether they are favorable or unfavorable to me at the time.  The apocalyptic tries to encourage us to accept the "weakness" of God who won't over ride the freedom in the world which is the basis for true moral worth.  Without genuine freedom, morality has no value.  We'd be but robots or puppets of some great puppeteer.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2023

The human experience of time makes us "futurists," since in the succession of befores and afters, we live toward the afters and in language we have genres of the future.  In biblical language the apocalyptic is one genre of the future which had functional purposes within the communities which generated writing products of this genre of the futuer.  

December 1, 2023

Biblical writings include both apocalyptic and utopian imagery as a way to continue to believe in justice as well as continue to set the direction of self-surpassability toward what is ideal.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2024

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2024 With language we have come to explore the behaviors of the world towards us in the continual development...