Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2019
The "Left Behind" novels and movies derived from the interpretive apocalyptic "cults" within certain Christians group who hold that biblical writings are specifically predicative of future events, rather than appreciating that in the field of universal evente, there are repetitions of the eternal return of the same and there are discourses which engage the imagination for people who need comfort. In the Gospel proclaiming those who would be left behind, there is the contrast with those who were left behind in the days of Noah, i.e., Noah and his family and his menagerie of animals. So it is good to be left behind because one is not punished by death in a catastrophic event. Ironic that the "left behind" cult, regard it to be punishment while the "taken" crowd are regarded to be the mass assumption of people in the Rapture. Interesting how dueling interpreters can get so exorcised over things about which they have no control so it smacks with how people use religious discourse to entertain themselves for their own comfort within their very small hermeneutical circles.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2019
Having the last word means that one often presumes to place a final editorial meaning on everything that has come before. We are often those who proclaim the last word as our attempt to control what has already happened; as a way to pronounce our ego-centric or ethno-centric or temporo-centric providence on how the past really affirm us in our lives now. It is too natural to assume that history revolves around "me" since I am the only one at the center of my perceptual universe. Jesus warned about too many final last word prophets when he knew that the Father of all freedom and everlasting time always knows that there is always some more latest words to feebly try to sum up what has happened before. It could be that the "Father" knows that the future always has to stay "open" in the conditions of freedom and time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2019
Sometimes we use the biblical apocalyptic term "Last Day," to refer to an end, even when it is based upon another kind of beginning. Perhaps given our embrace of science and time, we should just use the term, "latest day," and only the "Father" knows the "Latest Day," since only Plenitude comprehends total synchronicity of all things so as to be able to understand all causal connections and the latest meaning of all things.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2019
"No one knows the hour and the day of "that day." "That day" refers vaguely to some sort of end of the life of the people of the world as we know it. Jesus said that no one knows except the Father. Yet for 2000 years, Christians have been speculating and some even presuming to tie down specific days or times. In our scientific era, we might be able to conceive of life without humanity since we would assume the universe would continue even if humanity wasn't around to witness such continuity. (if someone didn't witness the tree falling in the forest, did it really fall?) Apocalyptic and catastrophic ending of all is perhaps the projection upon "social existence" what we know will happen for the personal apocalypse of each person, namely death itself. Why do people speculate about a Future beyond the future? We have science fiction stories of the new life of cyborgs and time travel which provide us the genres to deal with the questions about the future for which we have no experience. We cannot experience the future so we have to make it up for ourselves now as a way to live now with the comfort of creating anthropocentric privilege, as if, we've lived so well that we deserve being propagated as the chief value of all things. The belief in God is that there is an expanding horizon which always deconstructs "anthropocentricism" as the final value of all things. God is the proclamation of the impossibility of escaping the anthropocentric and yet that impossibility evokes human imagination.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2019
The consciousness of ourselves as worded-beings happens because we have words themselves and in the field of words which comprise us we use language in diverse discursive ways. The Bible is full of the various discursive ways of using language and all discursive ways are not equal, and that does not discount the fact that are uses of language are meaningfully true in how each discourse is wielded for its own functional purpose. Naïve realism or commonsense discourse found in the Bible corresponds to the discourse of modern science and modern journalistic writing. Modern science has attain the status of a "higher truth" since in being effective for the matters of statistical approximation, its pragmatic truth feature is unparalleled. The inferiority complex of those who use more aesthetically inclined discourses when compared with the "superior" pragmatic truth status of science, resulted in fundamentalists claiming that most of biblical discourse is like scientific truth and journalistic writing, and therefore shared in the same "truth" status as science. Even if science can "reduce" love to dopamine and chemistry, it does not change the true meaningful status of all sorts of love discourses.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2019
Word is true, in that we understand ourselves as first language users before and within the worded-creation of the world of word-mediated reality, including reality as being word-mediated. As worded being we express the truths of wordedness in lots of different discourses and lots of literary genres. We would criticize someone for saying that a mythopoeia writing was journalistic writing. Why? They would violate both the truth of the mythopoeia and journalism. So too, lots of non-fundamentalists have left the biblical religion because fundamentalism has taken over the hegemony to define "true" religion, by implying that all biblical literature is "exact journalistic" literature, fully verifiable under journalistic standards. And people who say that one can only read the Bible as journalistic writing cause many to discount the Bible as "crazy" and not a book of a variety of discourses and genres of writings which comport to the ways in which we are human in our language.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2019
One of the misinterpretation issues of doctrine and creed is that they come to language to try to convert poetry to didactic discourse and so they attain administrative and juridical and canonical status for determining "official" belief and so people are divided into orthodox and heterodox and what is lost is the original poetry of love for Christ in the midst of people fighting about who is right.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2019
The billboard on the cross of Jesus read, "The King of the Jews." Jesus was on the cross for six hours and how literate would the crowd have been on Golgotha for those six hours? What kind of effective messaging would that have been compared with the proclaiming of this ironic message through the Gospels for the rest of history. The literary effect of recounting this very short "messaging event" was to propel the irony of the Messiah on the cross forever.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2019
How can Christ be a king from the cross? In the mysticism of the early church, identity with the death of Christ on the cross is seen as power to die to what is unworthy in oneself, even as identity with the resurrection of Christ is the power to manifest transformed behaviors. So to make the death of Christ into his voluntary death is to transform it as an event of powerlessness into an event of "kingly" power.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2019
The recounting of the written inscription upon the cross of Jesus is sheer literary irony on the nexus between Jesus as Suffering Servant/Conquering King. Certainly the readers would understand the irony of the billboard of the crucifixion. It is a billboard to proclaim the irony of views of Jesus, i.e., the views of those who had experience of the Risen Christ, the views of those who thought the Messiah to be a conquering deliverer of Israel and the Roman people of power who mocked these oppressed people even using a language of kingship about one of their own. A king on a cross? How absurd!
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2019
An early paradigm shift in the Judaeo-Christian Jesus Movement was the admission of the Gentiles to the community of faith without the requirement of significant ritual observance. An earlier paradigm shift was the privileging of the "Suffering Servant" Messiah paradigm over the paradigm of the Messiah being limited to a Davidic kingly figure who would bring liberation for the people of Israel.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19,2019
It would be difficult for a member of the synagogue in the post-Jesus era to acknowledge that Jesus was the Messiah, given the specific Davidic notion of the Messiah, and given the fact that the same member did not have a post-resurrection experience of the Risen Christ and if the same member did not have what the members of the Jesus Movement called the "baptism" of the Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2019
The afterlife of Jesus of Nazareth in the modes of his reappearances forced a redefinition of the Messiah. Was the Messiah another King David or was he a suffering servant? The Passion of Jesus forced the attention to the suffering servant model for defining the Messiah and to those in the synagogue who did not experience significant spiritual effects of the Risen Christ, Jesus could not be a Messiah in the kingly tradition of David.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2019
The Bible might be regarded as the classics, a book to be displayed in an impressive leather bound cover in a book case to show people how classy one is, but the book is for display only and not to be read. Many classics are regarded that way and it does not mean that they are not important; what it means is that what has been derived from the Bible in the endless numbers of correspondences which have inundated all subsequent literature has overwhelmed the original because the applications of the original themes in new settings often has meant that the application has become unmoored from it connection with the original. We revere the classic even as we forget what derived from them and we elevate the contemporary as more original than the original and in temporal provincialism we proclaim the new as the only thing that can be. As Whitehead said that Western philosophy is a footnote on Plato and Aristotle, one could say that much of modern language use is but a footnote on the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2019
The utopian and the apocalyptic words of the Bible juxtapose the eutopian with the dystopian. In a system of freedom eutopian and dystopian are extremes on a continuum of the disharmony of differences and the harmony of differences. What transcends both dystopia or eutopia? Freedom. Freedom prevails no matter what conditions manifest itself affecting any particular agent which lives and moves and has being with Freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2019
Does a system of freedom ever permit a "eutopia" a good place for everyone and everything? Is a free system made for the evolving of the fittest surviving at the expense of the "unfit" weak? Are the fittest eventually the unsuspecting, e.g., cockroaches survive but not the imposing T-Rex? Is the system of freedom one which is based upon the passing of time and the end of any temporary fit "apparent" winner who only has a "season" of apparent "success?" The ultimate utopia or "no such place" in a free system is the words of Jesus when he said, "the meek shall inherit the earth."
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2019
Utopia is pronounced like Eu-topia, which would mean good place and we often think that Utopia refers to a heavenly good place, so that they might seem to be synonymous. Utopia is not a word found in the Bible even though one might find visionary scenarios in the Bible to qualify as "utopia." The word from the Greek is "Ou-topos" which which would be a negative, probably meaning, "no such place." We might ponder how "no such place" functions in a system of such competitive freedom and whether any free system could actually exist without competition and conflict between entities and system is overcome by a totally free harmony of differences.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2019
John Lennon's "Imagine" song was one might say "naively" utopian. But all utopian vision are naïve since they wish the cessation of the conditions of freedom. They express a desire for a synchronic harmony of differences among all of the infinite number of things which comprise the universe, but more specifically the differences between all people and animal life in general. The desire for peace is contextually constituted in that those on the losing side of oppression want the oppression to cease. The powerful ones who oppressed want a continuance of a peace that is forced through the subjugation of sectors in society. In a system of freedom where the "fittist survive" one can desire an end of all preditor-prey relationships where harm of any is eliminated as the expression of what substantial peace would mean. One can find the validity of the aspiration of such systemic peace even while one also would need to posit the presence of a great persuasive force which could persuade a system-wide synchronic harmony of differences without the harm of any individual. How does one posit genuine freedom while hoping for the conditions when all individuals have angelic goodness to "choose" harmony in the conditions of difference? It would seem impossible to posit a true meaning of freedom and the conditions where there would be a "forced" or "robotic angelic" harmony. One might conclude that individual wish for the peace of absence of conflict for personal life is valid even while it is impossible for it to be actually realized as a categorical imperative of the same. How does one aspire for universal peace without violating any coherent notion of freedom?
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2019
Utopian visions are visions of the impossible, given the conditions of freedom. How can one have a total system of free agents, both sentient and non-sentient, and have perpetual harmony where no harm is caused by competing perfectly timed agents. How can freedom and utopia co-exist without the system being completely robotic. I don't think the Bible resolves the issue of freedom and the utopic.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2019
The conditions of freedom means that all entities which share a degree of freedom both individually and in solidarities render a wide range of situations. We have the possibility for harmony of differences which create the vision of "utopia" supposing that all differences could be coordinated without causing individual harm. We also know that freedom does not allow such universal harmony because some entity is always on the receiving end of pain or deprivation. While it might be great that the preditor's hunger is satisfied; at the same time the prey's well-being is sacrificed for the satisfaction of the more powerful. The biblical visions of utopia are given to inform us toward the ideal harmonies towards which we should live in the never ending quest for justice, which means everyone and everything receives its appropriate due. The conditions of freedom are always deconstructed by the future, not yet, utopia.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2019
A nuance of the Redeemer referred to in the book of Job is a lawyer or advocate for one's life, especially all of the events which occur over which one does not have direct control and yet give cause for others to make one a victim of the unforeseen. One cannot be so powerful as to make really, really bad or good things happen to oneself so as to be accorded such status by other who want to make one into such a powerful victim for causing the bad thing to happen. At the last day, one hope for the Advocate of the 20/20 hindsight who can declare one's history as providence.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2019
The afterlife, what is it like? What kind of personal and social continuity happens after we die? Do we retain friendships and marriage relationships? Does it matter? Are we a new creation then? Are we raised as “spiritual bodies” as Paul indicated? Will we become like angels, as Jesus indicated, and as angelic beings not need to be married or given in marriage. The truth of resurrection thinking is that we carry pre-resurrection categories of thinking about an experience that we have not yet had. We are troubled about a future about which we don’t have the ability to extrapolate since we can only think about a future in continuity with the norm of our current conscious life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2019
If I don't believe in the resurrection, perhaps I can tease my friend who does by posing hypothetical scenarios regarding his belief. A levirate marriage required a brother to marry his brothers widow so that the deceased brother could be objectively immortalized in having posthumous children (really his brother's). So a widow seven times with seven brothers dies after out-living all the brothers, to whom is the woman married when she enters the afterlife? Remember that you only believe the afterlife for the seven brothers is to be found in the children borne by this one woman. This would be a family with children who were siblings and first cousins at the same time. Since Jesus regarded God as the ever-Becoming, God encompassed everyone who had become as still living since God was a creating, becoming, everliving all-inclusive Being.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2019
The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus helped to answers questions of the afterlife that were evident in the theological discussion of the era. Jesus proved timely for the times.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2019
The presentation of the dialogue about the resurrection and levirate marriage was instigated by religious leaders who believed in the objective immortality of a person in their offspring. The purpose of levirate marriage was to give children to a dead brother so he could have objective immortality (only designated immortality, not real genetic objective immortality). Jesus suggested that personal identity in the afterlife would be like the "ungendered" angels who did not get married. Remember the first Adam had to be split in two, into male and female because he was not supposed to be "alone." Jesus was perhaps indicating that in the afterlife one became re-constituted in a balancing contra-sexual fullness that had marriage as the pre-afterlife program.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2019
If God is ultimate Plenitude then it would be an oxymoron to say that something was missing from Plenitude. Take away anything from Plenitude and it would cease to be Plentitude. Jesus said that God was God of the living and the living for God included those who had experienced the past tense state of death in this life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2019
During the early first century in Palestine, resurrection was a topic which needed some specificity. Some thought that the prophets and other writings (ketavim) of the Hebrew Scriptures presented resurrection as justice verifier. Others thought that the Torah had no words of reference for believing it. Resurrection enters the discussion about how immortal the past is in the present and the future. How is the past immortal in what it contributes to the present? How is the past "identities" distinguished or identified in the present? How will the past and present "identity entities" be retained in the future that is unseen from the present? Using the computer analogy, can the mega-Memory of God ever delete any file that came to identity in time? Can the file of the past be re-opened and can God's grace mean that a very "personal file" have the "edit enable" function "clicked on" to allow it to be made suitable for a new future context?
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2019
It is interesting that in just four Gospels, tax-collector is mentioned around twenty times. With such a Gospel "representation" one would think that tax-collector was a significant group of people in Palestine during the time of Jesus. We know that Jesus ate with them and called them, as in the case of perhaps Matthew/Levi and Zacchaeus. It could be that they were non-observant Jews because of their position and they lived between Roman authorities and their countrymen and were despised by both. Jesus gave them community status in his Movement and it could be that they helped "finance" the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2019
All Souls' Day is for those who didn't make it into any official Christian "Hall of Fame." It is human to ponder whether we retain personal identity after we are dead. And if one believes in continuing personal identity after one dies, it is human to speculate about what sort of continuing personal identity that one might have. One prayer for the faithful departed posits the continuing growth in faith in the afterlife based upon the assumption that personal identity is not static but still participates in dynamic growth. We project upon the afterlife much of the dynamic conditions of the before-afterlife and the imaginative faith about the hereafter is an expression about having faith that creative, dynamic freedom will always be a life condition including the state of death in Life, Eternal Life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2019
How do people get into all of the various halls of fame of human excellence? People get recognized because their excellence stands out to be remembered and stand as value-setting behaviors for all. While all are "merely" human, human excellence in manifold way gets recognize. So too, the Christian "hall of fame" of saints is a group of "merely human" people who for various reason came to be remember for excellence in faith and faithful behaviors and were remembered beyond their locale and era in time as examples to call us all to the particular paths of excellence which await all who seek to tread this path.
The "Left Behind" novels and movies derived from the interpretive apocalyptic "cults" within certain Christians group who hold that biblical writings are specifically predicative of future events, rather than appreciating that in the field of universal evente, there are repetitions of the eternal return of the same and there are discourses which engage the imagination for people who need comfort. In the Gospel proclaiming those who would be left behind, there is the contrast with those who were left behind in the days of Noah, i.e., Noah and his family and his menagerie of animals. So it is good to be left behind because one is not punished by death in a catastrophic event. Ironic that the "left behind" cult, regard it to be punishment while the "taken" crowd are regarded to be the mass assumption of people in the Rapture. Interesting how dueling interpreters can get so exorcised over things about which they have no control so it smacks with how people use religious discourse to entertain themselves for their own comfort within their very small hermeneutical circles.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2019
Having the last word means that one often presumes to place a final editorial meaning on everything that has come before. We are often those who proclaim the last word as our attempt to control what has already happened; as a way to pronounce our ego-centric or ethno-centric or temporo-centric providence on how the past really affirm us in our lives now. It is too natural to assume that history revolves around "me" since I am the only one at the center of my perceptual universe. Jesus warned about too many final last word prophets when he knew that the Father of all freedom and everlasting time always knows that there is always some more latest words to feebly try to sum up what has happened before. It could be that the "Father" knows that the future always has to stay "open" in the conditions of freedom and time.
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2019
Sometimes we use the biblical apocalyptic term "Last Day," to refer to an end, even when it is based upon another kind of beginning. Perhaps given our embrace of science and time, we should just use the term, "latest day," and only the "Father" knows the "Latest Day," since only Plenitude comprehends total synchronicity of all things so as to be able to understand all causal connections and the latest meaning of all things.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2019
"No one knows the hour and the day of "that day." "That day" refers vaguely to some sort of end of the life of the people of the world as we know it. Jesus said that no one knows except the Father. Yet for 2000 years, Christians have been speculating and some even presuming to tie down specific days or times. In our scientific era, we might be able to conceive of life without humanity since we would assume the universe would continue even if humanity wasn't around to witness such continuity. (if someone didn't witness the tree falling in the forest, did it really fall?) Apocalyptic and catastrophic ending of all is perhaps the projection upon "social existence" what we know will happen for the personal apocalypse of each person, namely death itself. Why do people speculate about a Future beyond the future? We have science fiction stories of the new life of cyborgs and time travel which provide us the genres to deal with the questions about the future for which we have no experience. We cannot experience the future so we have to make it up for ourselves now as a way to live now with the comfort of creating anthropocentric privilege, as if, we've lived so well that we deserve being propagated as the chief value of all things. The belief in God is that there is an expanding horizon which always deconstructs "anthropocentricism" as the final value of all things. God is the proclamation of the impossibility of escaping the anthropocentric and yet that impossibility evokes human imagination.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2019
The consciousness of ourselves as worded-beings happens because we have words themselves and in the field of words which comprise us we use language in diverse discursive ways. The Bible is full of the various discursive ways of using language and all discursive ways are not equal, and that does not discount the fact that are uses of language are meaningfully true in how each discourse is wielded for its own functional purpose. Naïve realism or commonsense discourse found in the Bible corresponds to the discourse of modern science and modern journalistic writing. Modern science has attain the status of a "higher truth" since in being effective for the matters of statistical approximation, its pragmatic truth feature is unparalleled. The inferiority complex of those who use more aesthetically inclined discourses when compared with the "superior" pragmatic truth status of science, resulted in fundamentalists claiming that most of biblical discourse is like scientific truth and journalistic writing, and therefore shared in the same "truth" status as science. Even if science can "reduce" love to dopamine and chemistry, it does not change the true meaningful status of all sorts of love discourses.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2019
Word is true, in that we understand ourselves as first language users before and within the worded-creation of the world of word-mediated reality, including reality as being word-mediated. As worded being we express the truths of wordedness in lots of different discourses and lots of literary genres. We would criticize someone for saying that a mythopoeia writing was journalistic writing. Why? They would violate both the truth of the mythopoeia and journalism. So too, lots of non-fundamentalists have left the biblical religion because fundamentalism has taken over the hegemony to define "true" religion, by implying that all biblical literature is "exact journalistic" literature, fully verifiable under journalistic standards. And people who say that one can only read the Bible as journalistic writing cause many to discount the Bible as "crazy" and not a book of a variety of discourses and genres of writings which comport to the ways in which we are human in our language.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2019
One of the misinterpretation issues of doctrine and creed is that they come to language to try to convert poetry to didactic discourse and so they attain administrative and juridical and canonical status for determining "official" belief and so people are divided into orthodox and heterodox and what is lost is the original poetry of love for Christ in the midst of people fighting about who is right.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2019
The billboard on the cross of Jesus read, "The King of the Jews." Jesus was on the cross for six hours and how literate would the crowd have been on Golgotha for those six hours? What kind of effective messaging would that have been compared with the proclaiming of this ironic message through the Gospels for the rest of history. The literary effect of recounting this very short "messaging event" was to propel the irony of the Messiah on the cross forever.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2019
How can Christ be a king from the cross? In the mysticism of the early church, identity with the death of Christ on the cross is seen as power to die to what is unworthy in oneself, even as identity with the resurrection of Christ is the power to manifest transformed behaviors. So to make the death of Christ into his voluntary death is to transform it as an event of powerlessness into an event of "kingly" power.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2019
The recounting of the written inscription upon the cross of Jesus is sheer literary irony on the nexus between Jesus as Suffering Servant/Conquering King. Certainly the readers would understand the irony of the billboard of the crucifixion. It is a billboard to proclaim the irony of views of Jesus, i.e., the views of those who had experience of the Risen Christ, the views of those who thought the Messiah to be a conquering deliverer of Israel and the Roman people of power who mocked these oppressed people even using a language of kingship about one of their own. A king on a cross? How absurd!
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2019
An early paradigm shift in the Judaeo-Christian Jesus Movement was the admission of the Gentiles to the community of faith without the requirement of significant ritual observance. An earlier paradigm shift was the privileging of the "Suffering Servant" Messiah paradigm over the paradigm of the Messiah being limited to a Davidic kingly figure who would bring liberation for the people of Israel.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19,2019
It would be difficult for a member of the synagogue in the post-Jesus era to acknowledge that Jesus was the Messiah, given the specific Davidic notion of the Messiah, and given the fact that the same member did not have a post-resurrection experience of the Risen Christ and if the same member did not have what the members of the Jesus Movement called the "baptism" of the Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2019
The afterlife of Jesus of Nazareth in the modes of his reappearances forced a redefinition of the Messiah. Was the Messiah another King David or was he a suffering servant? The Passion of Jesus forced the attention to the suffering servant model for defining the Messiah and to those in the synagogue who did not experience significant spiritual effects of the Risen Christ, Jesus could not be a Messiah in the kingly tradition of David.
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2019
The Bible might be regarded as the classics, a book to be displayed in an impressive leather bound cover in a book case to show people how classy one is, but the book is for display only and not to be read. Many classics are regarded that way and it does not mean that they are not important; what it means is that what has been derived from the Bible in the endless numbers of correspondences which have inundated all subsequent literature has overwhelmed the original because the applications of the original themes in new settings often has meant that the application has become unmoored from it connection with the original. We revere the classic even as we forget what derived from them and we elevate the contemporary as more original than the original and in temporal provincialism we proclaim the new as the only thing that can be. As Whitehead said that Western philosophy is a footnote on Plato and Aristotle, one could say that much of modern language use is but a footnote on the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2019
The utopian and the apocalyptic words of the Bible juxtapose the eutopian with the dystopian. In a system of freedom eutopian and dystopian are extremes on a continuum of the disharmony of differences and the harmony of differences. What transcends both dystopia or eutopia? Freedom. Freedom prevails no matter what conditions manifest itself affecting any particular agent which lives and moves and has being with Freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2019
Does a system of freedom ever permit a "eutopia" a good place for everyone and everything? Is a free system made for the evolving of the fittest surviving at the expense of the "unfit" weak? Are the fittest eventually the unsuspecting, e.g., cockroaches survive but not the imposing T-Rex? Is the system of freedom one which is based upon the passing of time and the end of any temporary fit "apparent" winner who only has a "season" of apparent "success?" The ultimate utopia or "no such place" in a free system is the words of Jesus when he said, "the meek shall inherit the earth."
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2019
Utopia is pronounced like Eu-topia, which would mean good place and we often think that Utopia refers to a heavenly good place, so that they might seem to be synonymous. Utopia is not a word found in the Bible even though one might find visionary scenarios in the Bible to qualify as "utopia." The word from the Greek is "Ou-topos" which which would be a negative, probably meaning, "no such place." We might ponder how "no such place" functions in a system of such competitive freedom and whether any free system could actually exist without competition and conflict between entities and system is overcome by a totally free harmony of differences.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2019
John Lennon's "Imagine" song was one might say "naively" utopian. But all utopian vision are naïve since they wish the cessation of the conditions of freedom. They express a desire for a synchronic harmony of differences among all of the infinite number of things which comprise the universe, but more specifically the differences between all people and animal life in general. The desire for peace is contextually constituted in that those on the losing side of oppression want the oppression to cease. The powerful ones who oppressed want a continuance of a peace that is forced through the subjugation of sectors in society. In a system of freedom where the "fittist survive" one can desire an end of all preditor-prey relationships where harm of any is eliminated as the expression of what substantial peace would mean. One can find the validity of the aspiration of such systemic peace even while one also would need to posit the presence of a great persuasive force which could persuade a system-wide synchronic harmony of differences without the harm of any individual. How does one posit genuine freedom while hoping for the conditions when all individuals have angelic goodness to "choose" harmony in the conditions of difference? It would seem impossible to posit a true meaning of freedom and the conditions where there would be a "forced" or "robotic angelic" harmony. One might conclude that individual wish for the peace of absence of conflict for personal life is valid even while it is impossible for it to be actually realized as a categorical imperative of the same. How does one aspire for universal peace without violating any coherent notion of freedom?
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2019
Utopian visions are visions of the impossible, given the conditions of freedom. How can one have a total system of free agents, both sentient and non-sentient, and have perpetual harmony where no harm is caused by competing perfectly timed agents. How can freedom and utopia co-exist without the system being completely robotic. I don't think the Bible resolves the issue of freedom and the utopic.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2019
The conditions of freedom means that all entities which share a degree of freedom both individually and in solidarities render a wide range of situations. We have the possibility for harmony of differences which create the vision of "utopia" supposing that all differences could be coordinated without causing individual harm. We also know that freedom does not allow such universal harmony because some entity is always on the receiving end of pain or deprivation. While it might be great that the preditor's hunger is satisfied; at the same time the prey's well-being is sacrificed for the satisfaction of the more powerful. The biblical visions of utopia are given to inform us toward the ideal harmonies towards which we should live in the never ending quest for justice, which means everyone and everything receives its appropriate due. The conditions of freedom are always deconstructed by the future, not yet, utopia.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2019
A nuance of the Redeemer referred to in the book of Job is a lawyer or advocate for one's life, especially all of the events which occur over which one does not have direct control and yet give cause for others to make one a victim of the unforeseen. One cannot be so powerful as to make really, really bad or good things happen to oneself so as to be accorded such status by other who want to make one into such a powerful victim for causing the bad thing to happen. At the last day, one hope for the Advocate of the 20/20 hindsight who can declare one's history as providence.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2019
The afterlife, what is it like? What kind of personal and social continuity happens after we die? Do we retain friendships and marriage relationships? Does it matter? Are we a new creation then? Are we raised as “spiritual bodies” as Paul indicated? Will we become like angels, as Jesus indicated, and as angelic beings not need to be married or given in marriage. The truth of resurrection thinking is that we carry pre-resurrection categories of thinking about an experience that we have not yet had. We are troubled about a future about which we don’t have the ability to extrapolate since we can only think about a future in continuity with the norm of our current conscious life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2019
If I don't believe in the resurrection, perhaps I can tease my friend who does by posing hypothetical scenarios regarding his belief. A levirate marriage required a brother to marry his brothers widow so that the deceased brother could be objectively immortalized in having posthumous children (really his brother's). So a widow seven times with seven brothers dies after out-living all the brothers, to whom is the woman married when she enters the afterlife? Remember that you only believe the afterlife for the seven brothers is to be found in the children borne by this one woman. This would be a family with children who were siblings and first cousins at the same time. Since Jesus regarded God as the ever-Becoming, God encompassed everyone who had become as still living since God was a creating, becoming, everliving all-inclusive Being.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2019
The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus helped to answers questions of the afterlife that were evident in the theological discussion of the era. Jesus proved timely for the times.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2019
The presentation of the dialogue about the resurrection and levirate marriage was instigated by religious leaders who believed in the objective immortality of a person in their offspring. The purpose of levirate marriage was to give children to a dead brother so he could have objective immortality (only designated immortality, not real genetic objective immortality). Jesus suggested that personal identity in the afterlife would be like the "ungendered" angels who did not get married. Remember the first Adam had to be split in two, into male and female because he was not supposed to be "alone." Jesus was perhaps indicating that in the afterlife one became re-constituted in a balancing contra-sexual fullness that had marriage as the pre-afterlife program.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2019
If God is ultimate Plenitude then it would be an oxymoron to say that something was missing from Plenitude. Take away anything from Plenitude and it would cease to be Plentitude. Jesus said that God was God of the living and the living for God included those who had experienced the past tense state of death in this life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2019
During the early first century in Palestine, resurrection was a topic which needed some specificity. Some thought that the prophets and other writings (ketavim) of the Hebrew Scriptures presented resurrection as justice verifier. Others thought that the Torah had no words of reference for believing it. Resurrection enters the discussion about how immortal the past is in the present and the future. How is the past immortal in what it contributes to the present? How is the past "identities" distinguished or identified in the present? How will the past and present "identity entities" be retained in the future that is unseen from the present? Using the computer analogy, can the mega-Memory of God ever delete any file that came to identity in time? Can the file of the past be re-opened and can God's grace mean that a very "personal file" have the "edit enable" function "clicked on" to allow it to be made suitable for a new future context?
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2019
It is interesting that in just four Gospels, tax-collector is mentioned around twenty times. With such a Gospel "representation" one would think that tax-collector was a significant group of people in Palestine during the time of Jesus. We know that Jesus ate with them and called them, as in the case of perhaps Matthew/Levi and Zacchaeus. It could be that they were non-observant Jews because of their position and they lived between Roman authorities and their countrymen and were despised by both. Jesus gave them community status in his Movement and it could be that they helped "finance" the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2019
All Souls' Day is for those who didn't make it into any official Christian "Hall of Fame." It is human to ponder whether we retain personal identity after we are dead. And if one believes in continuing personal identity after one dies, it is human to speculate about what sort of continuing personal identity that one might have. One prayer for the faithful departed posits the continuing growth in faith in the afterlife based upon the assumption that personal identity is not static but still participates in dynamic growth. We project upon the afterlife much of the dynamic conditions of the before-afterlife and the imaginative faith about the hereafter is an expression about having faith that creative, dynamic freedom will always be a life condition including the state of death in Life, Eternal Life.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2019
How do people get into all of the various halls of fame of human excellence? People get recognized because their excellence stands out to be remembered and stand as value-setting behaviors for all. While all are "merely" human, human excellence in manifold way gets recognize. So too, the Christian "hall of fame" of saints is a group of "merely human" people who for various reason came to be remember for excellence in faith and faithful behaviors and were remembered beyond their locale and era in time as examples to call us all to the particular paths of excellence which await all who seek to tread this path.
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