Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2019
The magi in the infancy narrative is an indication of writing the Christ appeal to the Gentile into the origins of the Jesus story. Since Christ came to have "universal" appeal among the peoples of the Roman world, it must have been the case from the beginning. In fact, anyone who is "wise" who seek out the birth of Christ. And of course Bethlehem because the topos of the birth of Christ within the hearts of many Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2019
The life of Jesus was presented to an audience of Jews and Gentiles. Even though the Gentile membership of the early Jesus Movement grew to be more than the members of the synagogue, the expositors presented Jesus in parallel with themes found in the lives of heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures. Moses came forth from Egypt; Jesus had to as well as he is presented in the flight to Egypt during the reign of Herod who is a figure re-presenting the infanticidal Pharaoh.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2019
One of the most poignant proofs of Word creating our life is the story of Helen Keller. When she understood Word, her life was created. All things are created by the Word. Word is the condition for everything to be in the flux of continual deferring signifiers. Life is only about the continual shuffling of synonyms in an endless tautology of this is this is this is this...….
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2019
When we imagine what it is like to be like an infant and not have a significant language capacity or when we imagine unevolved pre-language creatures, we only bring the pre-linguistic state into existence by the contrast with the state of having language. In the "imaginary" pre-linguistic state there would be no such consciousness of such a state because "language" would not exist. Having language creates everything that can be known as having being.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2019
In the beginning of human life as it can only be known is Word, word ability. If anything comes into being known it is through language mediation. That everything human that can be known is meditated through Word means that Word is co-extensive with anything that can be humanly known, including existence itself.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2019
All things came into being through the Word. Does coming into being, or becoming actually mean that existence is only known through language? Existence or awareness of the same presume language and a language user. How we like to ignore that everything is mediated through language even the awareness that we are language users. Philosophers and scientists often like to build incredible systems without acknowledging that such systems reside on language traditions which all derived from "having language in the first place."
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2019
For the Christian mystic, the feast of the Nativity forces a different kind of empirical verification. Does the birth of Christ actually happen within a person and does it make a noticeable difference in one's life after such a birth is said to have happened? The empirical verification of the birth of Christ is seen in behaviors of love and justice. Such is much more important than trying to import twentieth century biology back to the first century.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2019
If everything that can be known is mediated through having word ability then everything that can be known or that came come to some language product has equal standing in being a "word product." What human communities and solidarities of people coalesce around are their organizing values regarding what is most adequate for human excellence within the areas that pertain to living within community. Each genre of language products include a dynamic struggle for both defining adequacy and manifesting the most adequate adequacy. In faith communities we are saying that love and justice for the most people is what is most adequate and tactics and strategies for reaching the most adequate are called for. Our society has become defined as "partisan;" this is antithetical to the common good because partisans are saying that my good is the common good and all that matters is having the power to say that my good is the most common good.
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2019
We have externalized the Christmas story into such garish excess that we have forgotten that it is the coded mystagogy of the early church, a revealed mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory and the early church initiates reading the Gospel understood that Mary was the paradigm for everyone whose life had been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to create a clean heart where Christ could reside.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2019
We are contextual people in that we live, move and speak from our particular contexts. Somehow many Bible readers will not allow biblical writers to embraces the discursive modes appropriate to their own contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2019
People have been taught to read the Bible as if the natural laws did not prevail during biblical times.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2019
Many Bible readers assume that the writers were writing in the genre which we want them to be writing in so as to prove our own theological bias.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2019
It is better to look to the prophets as providing the conceptual language to present Jesus Christ for his expositors of the early church. To try to use the prophets as explicitly predictive of Jesus is to ignore the obvious that the writings of Isaiah are really contextually specific to his own time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2019
St. Paul wrote that Jesus was declared Son of God in his resurrection. After that declaration then the history of his life is written with this "must have always been" assumption about Jesus. Before something become apparent it must have had seeds of the miraculous before it become so apparent.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2019
One of the unfortunate consequences of the preponderance and success of modern science and the resulting discursive practices has been to set a person against oneself as a discursively schizoidal being. We have been taught to not regard ourselves as multi-valent and multi-discursive interpretive agents who can walk and chew gum at the same time within the field of discursive habits. We have assigned superior "truth" value to that which can be empirically verified while diminishing the "truth" value of the modes of aesthetics discourse. We have encouraged misguided interpretive practice due to setting empirical verification as the sole meaningful truth and so social scientists and religionist have decided to present their "truths" as empirically verifiable in the same way as the "truth" presentations of the natural scientists. Fundamentalism has been borne from this misguided situation. It is a violation of human capacity and have set the poetic person against the scientific person to the diminution of both.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2019
In the Isaian Hebrew, the word "alma" is translated into the Greek Septuagint as "Parthenos." "alma" means young woman and "Parthenos" means "virigin," and so one can understand how reading the Septuagint translation of Hebrew Scriptures influenced the presentation of the Virgin Mary.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2019
The Hebrew Scriptures include lots of wishing for utopia. All sorts of ideal conditions are dreamed about but perhaps in a reductive sense, the very name God implies ultimate utopian Being. God is no such Person as any of us has every known or seen and yet the connections within the Plenitude bring us to confess One Plenitude which sustains all that we can experience.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2019
In the appeal to the community of John the Baptist, the oracle words of Jesus state that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. This seems like quite a severe assessment. It indicates that the early church was promoting that the kingdom of heaven paradigm of Jesus was the baptism of the Spirit paradigm and the paradigm of John the Baptist and his community was the baptism in water paradigm. As much as John the Baptist is praised in the Gospels, there are poignant distinctions made between him and Jesus to convince the followers of John to "move on to Jesus."
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2019
The reason that there is the continual deferral of meaning often known as "turtles all the way down," is because there is no down when we actually know from outer space, there is only a temporal and contextual "down" depending upon the location of the one who says his head is up and his feet are down but what does that mean when floating in space? "Turtles all of the way down," refers to the boundless plenitude of word or language within which arise by and through language the appearance of language users who posit that the plenitudinous linguistic universe implies a Great Language User.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2019
The Gospel words of Jesus include the permission for his followers to "channel" his words when Jesus is recorded as saying that they can and should speak "in His Name." St. Paul seem to take equivalence with the thoughts of Jesus when he said that he had the "mind of Christ." The channeled words of the Risen Christ in the compilation of the Gospels in the situations of the Jesus Movement and the Christ communities indicate an unevenness and apparent inconsistencies, because the applied wisdom of the Risen Christ through the channeling preachers dealt with situations which would have been significantly different than from the actual time of Jesus when the churches did not yet exist. That channeled words of the Risen Christ attained the status of Holy Scripture is important to understand and appreciate how a living Christ is one whose loving principles find continual occasions of application. The fact that the "canon of Scripture" is closed does not negate how the infallible applications of the love of Christ in anytime is any less authorative.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2019
Since Irenaeus recommended the "plain reading" of the Gospel as the "preferred" reading, we realize that the most assessible and easiest and perhaps the "laziest" way to read the Gospels is in the mode of what Ricoeur called the mode of "primary naivete." To do the rigorous scholarly works about the original languages, context and provenance of a writing requires abilities not easily attained. Most reader can be "forgiven" for being readers in the primary naivete mode for personal devotional value. But it does remain that scholarship has to be rigorous and honest regarding all Scriptures and its compilation. This would include an appreciation that people of the past knew how to be users of poetic and mystical discourse and the use of the physical to be metaphorical of the spiritual. To assume that ancient people did not have a functional appreciation of what much later became known as "the law of gravity," is to diminish their contact with reality. The primary purpose of Scriptures would be more of a spiritual manual and literature to inculcate community identities rather than to be eye witness journalistic accounts of events or a scientific treatise. To make certain genres of the Scripture be literary genre which it they not, is to read them wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2019
The Scriptures include accounts of utopian, impossible conditions which represents the child-like hope of people who are world weary. The world needed a utopian person and for the early Christians, they believed that Jesus was this utopian person who qualified as newly defining what a Messiah should be. Jesus as a utopian person seemed to be humanly impossible in how he stood out in what he did and how he was experienced by people. How is it that so many people could re-experience Jesus after he had been dead? Surely this utopian impossible person had to be the new standard for how a Messiah or specially "anointed" extra-human person should be defined.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2019
The words of Jesus regarding John the Baptist and the least in the kingdom of heaven being greater than he, seems rather harsh. Intuitively, this makes more sense as an oracle of the Risen Christ in the early churches which were making an appeal to the members of the community of John the Baptist to make the transition to become followers of Jesus. This is consistent with the contrast between baptism with water and baptism with the Holy Spirit. The contrast is between natural birth and spiritual birth and the early church believed in the surpassing value of the spiritual birth which was the hallmark of the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2019
Religious and biblical discourse includes lots of "wish fulfillment," what we wish things were but are not yet. Hope is all about what is not yet. The discourse of hope is different from the discourse of science. Science is founded upon the dependence of the recurrence of things in predictable ways. In the realm of personal transformation on individual paths, we hope for things that are not yet even as we know the prediction of the same is not certain. The uncertainty of hope's objects mean that a different kind of discourse is rendered than the discourse of actuarial predictions of science.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2019
In the free conditions of the world, good and bad things occur since such are defined based upon what is happen to people in various contexts. Good for me, bad for them, good for them, bad for me. Utopia is trying to imagine a world where the knowledge of good and evil is gone and only the good is known. Universal good of course would be a robotic, machine of perfect innocence, all of the time, which would violate what makes morality and ethics, namely, freedom. So why posit impossible utopias of goodness and innocence when they would rob the world of moral significance? The image of goodness prevailing is the discursive lure for people to overcome evil with good. This is to counter the narrative of a dystopia where evil and chaos seem to win and would favor the belief in a fatalism where evil in fact overcomes good.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2019
The utopian is an impossible place except in language. Utopia does not have a correspondence in actuality, nor can it. So how does utopia function as discursive practice? It functions as a lure to influence all free agents within the conditions of freedom to seek the higher values of harmony of differences without harm being caused. Within the human conditions of freedom, the utopian vision is the discourse to inspire what Paul said to do, "over come evil with good." Why do that? Paul wrote that if we don't we could be overcome with evil. The utopian is the ideal and impossible which implies there is a totality beyond good or evil which is "only good and perfect." One might say that there is the total unity of being encompassed by everything that can come to language and such an all inclusive expanding language use universe is good and perfect to include everything, even while anything less than the all comprehending expanding totality must participate in the struggle of what good and evil means in each moment and situation for moral agents of all degrees of agency.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2019
"The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp." Isaian visionary writing is utopian, like much of biblical literature in the people who are opining about why the world is often so bad, painful and unfair. Although utopian is not a genre usually assigned to biblical writing, it should be. A mythical Eden of total harmonic innocence lost and then longed for again in the Isaian utopian vision of perfect non-predatory relationships in the world. Utopia is no such place; but we use utopia as an analgesic discourse to survive the conditions of freedom which involve harm, aging, loss, war, injustice and death. We would in the moments of harshness sacrifice all of the conditions of freedom for the utopian totalitarian remake of the world to be a machine of non-predatory goodness. In a more practical sense, we long for the loss of infant/child innocence, a state that can never characterize the adult world that has come to live with the knowledge and experience of good and evil. The Gospel invitation of Jesus to be like a "child" to perceive God's kingdom, means that we can mystically access the original innocence of our births and channel it into the harsh real world of good and evil to beat our lives into an adult counter-part of innocence, holiness.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2019
A discussion provoked by some biblical language is about time and whether the notion of "eternity" is "timelessness" or whether it is the infinite duration of time as everlastingness. Is eternity a synonym for everlasting? Do interior events or essences like dreams and "spirit" and soul refer to a timeless realm or can such only be reported or acknowledged by the prior assumption of time? Utopian or impossible worlds or perpetually "not yet" worlds might be tautological or definitional or mathematical equational certainty presumably open to falsification since the future in time would always mean that everything is open to future falsification. But if eternity is "timelessness" how is eternity open to falsification in everlastingness?
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2019
The fallacy of utopian view is the sheer escapism and the denial of what the conditions of freedom imply. To imagine utopia is to imagine a world without moral significance because things could not be but innocent. This is why the Garden of Eden story needed to include the insight of humanity attaining moral significance through the entrance of dealing with good and evil. The implying that the loss of innocence through making an ignorant decision based upon being tricked by a superior serpent and the loss of an innocent perfect world of perfect harmony is an attempt to attach precise causality to a mystery. Fundamentalists regard this the "fall" to be precisely causative of evil, whereas more sanguine interpreters regard this to be an insightful appreciation of the mystery which is a major question in the moral experience of humanity. In Advent the themes of a better and more innocent word return and yet we know that we cannot return to the innocence of childhood, we can only aspire to the holiness of successful repentance with the help in part of drill sergeants like John the Baptist.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2019
The pain of people, animals and systems in conflict is the situation for the imaginations of impossible conditions of harmony. Wouldn't it be nice if all animals were vegetarians and the predator-prey relationships non-existent. Eden must have been and we lost it and surely there is a power that could restore Edenic conditions. Can total innocence and freedom co-exist? Can human being always already choose to be angels without being innocent robots, bereft of moral significance? It could be that with imagination we dream impossible perfect worlds, "ou-topos," utopia or no such places, as a way to direct the freedom conditions of good and evil and systemic oppositions toward good as being the preferred outcome of freedom and evil be seen as the deprivation of the normalcy of goodness. To conceive of an impossible world where freedom does not exist because of a pre-programming to be "only good," is the entertainment analgesic discourse to provide coping and survival technique in face of the fact that for the most part the strong are taking advantage of the weak.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2019
How could Jesus on the cross be a Messiah? How could the Messiah only be known to those who had an epiphany of the Risen Lord? Why wasn't Jesus a Messiah like David who would at least give Israel control of her own borders? The Advent or Parousia was the "theological correction" completing the notion of the Messiah for those who could not see the Suffering Servant model of the Messiah as being adequate to all of the triumphant imagery for the Messiah. A delayed second coming was the answer proving that the future is open to falsifying almost any held view about what has happened in the past. Openness of the future inspires imaginations.
The magi in the infancy narrative is an indication of writing the Christ appeal to the Gentile into the origins of the Jesus story. Since Christ came to have "universal" appeal among the peoples of the Roman world, it must have been the case from the beginning. In fact, anyone who is "wise" who seek out the birth of Christ. And of course Bethlehem because the topos of the birth of Christ within the hearts of many Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2019
The life of Jesus was presented to an audience of Jews and Gentiles. Even though the Gentile membership of the early Jesus Movement grew to be more than the members of the synagogue, the expositors presented Jesus in parallel with themes found in the lives of heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures. Moses came forth from Egypt; Jesus had to as well as he is presented in the flight to Egypt during the reign of Herod who is a figure re-presenting the infanticidal Pharaoh.
Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2019
One of the most poignant proofs of Word creating our life is the story of Helen Keller. When she understood Word, her life was created. All things are created by the Word. Word is the condition for everything to be in the flux of continual deferring signifiers. Life is only about the continual shuffling of synonyms in an endless tautology of this is this is this is this...….
Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2019
When we imagine what it is like to be like an infant and not have a significant language capacity or when we imagine unevolved pre-language creatures, we only bring the pre-linguistic state into existence by the contrast with the state of having language. In the "imaginary" pre-linguistic state there would be no such consciousness of such a state because "language" would not exist. Having language creates everything that can be known as having being.
Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2019
In the beginning of human life as it can only be known is Word, word ability. If anything comes into being known it is through language mediation. That everything human that can be known is meditated through Word means that Word is co-extensive with anything that can be humanly known, including existence itself.
Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2019
All things came into being through the Word. Does coming into being, or becoming actually mean that existence is only known through language? Existence or awareness of the same presume language and a language user. How we like to ignore that everything is mediated through language even the awareness that we are language users. Philosophers and scientists often like to build incredible systems without acknowledging that such systems reside on language traditions which all derived from "having language in the first place."
Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2019
For the Christian mystic, the feast of the Nativity forces a different kind of empirical verification. Does the birth of Christ actually happen within a person and does it make a noticeable difference in one's life after such a birth is said to have happened? The empirical verification of the birth of Christ is seen in behaviors of love and justice. Such is much more important than trying to import twentieth century biology back to the first century.
Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2019
If everything that can be known is mediated through having word ability then everything that can be known or that came come to some language product has equal standing in being a "word product." What human communities and solidarities of people coalesce around are their organizing values regarding what is most adequate for human excellence within the areas that pertain to living within community. Each genre of language products include a dynamic struggle for both defining adequacy and manifesting the most adequate adequacy. In faith communities we are saying that love and justice for the most people is what is most adequate and tactics and strategies for reaching the most adequate are called for. Our society has become defined as "partisan;" this is antithetical to the common good because partisans are saying that my good is the common good and all that matters is having the power to say that my good is the most common good.
Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2019
We have externalized the Christmas story into such garish excess that we have forgotten that it is the coded mystagogy of the early church, a revealed mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory and the early church initiates reading the Gospel understood that Mary was the paradigm for everyone whose life had been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit to create a clean heart where Christ could reside.
Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2019
We are contextual people in that we live, move and speak from our particular contexts. Somehow many Bible readers will not allow biblical writers to embraces the discursive modes appropriate to their own contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2019
People have been taught to read the Bible as if the natural laws did not prevail during biblical times.
Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2019
Many Bible readers assume that the writers were writing in the genre which we want them to be writing in so as to prove our own theological bias.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2019
It is better to look to the prophets as providing the conceptual language to present Jesus Christ for his expositors of the early church. To try to use the prophets as explicitly predictive of Jesus is to ignore the obvious that the writings of Isaiah are really contextually specific to his own time.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2019
St. Paul wrote that Jesus was declared Son of God in his resurrection. After that declaration then the history of his life is written with this "must have always been" assumption about Jesus. Before something become apparent it must have had seeds of the miraculous before it become so apparent.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2019
One of the unfortunate consequences of the preponderance and success of modern science and the resulting discursive practices has been to set a person against oneself as a discursively schizoidal being. We have been taught to not regard ourselves as multi-valent and multi-discursive interpretive agents who can walk and chew gum at the same time within the field of discursive habits. We have assigned superior "truth" value to that which can be empirically verified while diminishing the "truth" value of the modes of aesthetics discourse. We have encouraged misguided interpretive practice due to setting empirical verification as the sole meaningful truth and so social scientists and religionist have decided to present their "truths" as empirically verifiable in the same way as the "truth" presentations of the natural scientists. Fundamentalism has been borne from this misguided situation. It is a violation of human capacity and have set the poetic person against the scientific person to the diminution of both.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2019
In the Isaian Hebrew, the word "alma" is translated into the Greek Septuagint as "Parthenos." "alma" means young woman and "Parthenos" means "virigin," and so one can understand how reading the Septuagint translation of Hebrew Scriptures influenced the presentation of the Virgin Mary.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2019
The Hebrew Scriptures include lots of wishing for utopia. All sorts of ideal conditions are dreamed about but perhaps in a reductive sense, the very name God implies ultimate utopian Being. God is no such Person as any of us has every known or seen and yet the connections within the Plenitude bring us to confess One Plenitude which sustains all that we can experience.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2019
In the appeal to the community of John the Baptist, the oracle words of Jesus state that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. This seems like quite a severe assessment. It indicates that the early church was promoting that the kingdom of heaven paradigm of Jesus was the baptism of the Spirit paradigm and the paradigm of John the Baptist and his community was the baptism in water paradigm. As much as John the Baptist is praised in the Gospels, there are poignant distinctions made between him and Jesus to convince the followers of John to "move on to Jesus."
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2019
The reason that there is the continual deferral of meaning often known as "turtles all the way down," is because there is no down when we actually know from outer space, there is only a temporal and contextual "down" depending upon the location of the one who says his head is up and his feet are down but what does that mean when floating in space? "Turtles all of the way down," refers to the boundless plenitude of word or language within which arise by and through language the appearance of language users who posit that the plenitudinous linguistic universe implies a Great Language User.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2019
The Gospel words of Jesus include the permission for his followers to "channel" his words when Jesus is recorded as saying that they can and should speak "in His Name." St. Paul seem to take equivalence with the thoughts of Jesus when he said that he had the "mind of Christ." The channeled words of the Risen Christ in the compilation of the Gospels in the situations of the Jesus Movement and the Christ communities indicate an unevenness and apparent inconsistencies, because the applied wisdom of the Risen Christ through the channeling preachers dealt with situations which would have been significantly different than from the actual time of Jesus when the churches did not yet exist. That channeled words of the Risen Christ attained the status of Holy Scripture is important to understand and appreciate how a living Christ is one whose loving principles find continual occasions of application. The fact that the "canon of Scripture" is closed does not negate how the infallible applications of the love of Christ in anytime is any less authorative.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2019
Since Irenaeus recommended the "plain reading" of the Gospel as the "preferred" reading, we realize that the most assessible and easiest and perhaps the "laziest" way to read the Gospels is in the mode of what Ricoeur called the mode of "primary naivete." To do the rigorous scholarly works about the original languages, context and provenance of a writing requires abilities not easily attained. Most reader can be "forgiven" for being readers in the primary naivete mode for personal devotional value. But it does remain that scholarship has to be rigorous and honest regarding all Scriptures and its compilation. This would include an appreciation that people of the past knew how to be users of poetic and mystical discourse and the use of the physical to be metaphorical of the spiritual. To assume that ancient people did not have a functional appreciation of what much later became known as "the law of gravity," is to diminish their contact with reality. The primary purpose of Scriptures would be more of a spiritual manual and literature to inculcate community identities rather than to be eye witness journalistic accounts of events or a scientific treatise. To make certain genres of the Scripture be literary genre which it they not, is to read them wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2019
The Scriptures include accounts of utopian, impossible conditions which represents the child-like hope of people who are world weary. The world needed a utopian person and for the early Christians, they believed that Jesus was this utopian person who qualified as newly defining what a Messiah should be. Jesus as a utopian person seemed to be humanly impossible in how he stood out in what he did and how he was experienced by people. How is it that so many people could re-experience Jesus after he had been dead? Surely this utopian impossible person had to be the new standard for how a Messiah or specially "anointed" extra-human person should be defined.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2019
The words of Jesus regarding John the Baptist and the least in the kingdom of heaven being greater than he, seems rather harsh. Intuitively, this makes more sense as an oracle of the Risen Christ in the early churches which were making an appeal to the members of the community of John the Baptist to make the transition to become followers of Jesus. This is consistent with the contrast between baptism with water and baptism with the Holy Spirit. The contrast is between natural birth and spiritual birth and the early church believed in the surpassing value of the spiritual birth which was the hallmark of the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2019
Religious and biblical discourse includes lots of "wish fulfillment," what we wish things were but are not yet. Hope is all about what is not yet. The discourse of hope is different from the discourse of science. Science is founded upon the dependence of the recurrence of things in predictable ways. In the realm of personal transformation on individual paths, we hope for things that are not yet even as we know the prediction of the same is not certain. The uncertainty of hope's objects mean that a different kind of discourse is rendered than the discourse of actuarial predictions of science.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2019
In the free conditions of the world, good and bad things occur since such are defined based upon what is happen to people in various contexts. Good for me, bad for them, good for them, bad for me. Utopia is trying to imagine a world where the knowledge of good and evil is gone and only the good is known. Universal good of course would be a robotic, machine of perfect innocence, all of the time, which would violate what makes morality and ethics, namely, freedom. So why posit impossible utopias of goodness and innocence when they would rob the world of moral significance? The image of goodness prevailing is the discursive lure for people to overcome evil with good. This is to counter the narrative of a dystopia where evil and chaos seem to win and would favor the belief in a fatalism where evil in fact overcomes good.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2019
The utopian is an impossible place except in language. Utopia does not have a correspondence in actuality, nor can it. So how does utopia function as discursive practice? It functions as a lure to influence all free agents within the conditions of freedom to seek the higher values of harmony of differences without harm being caused. Within the human conditions of freedom, the utopian vision is the discourse to inspire what Paul said to do, "over come evil with good." Why do that? Paul wrote that if we don't we could be overcome with evil. The utopian is the ideal and impossible which implies there is a totality beyond good or evil which is "only good and perfect." One might say that there is the total unity of being encompassed by everything that can come to language and such an all inclusive expanding language use universe is good and perfect to include everything, even while anything less than the all comprehending expanding totality must participate in the struggle of what good and evil means in each moment and situation for moral agents of all degrees of agency.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2019
"The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp." Isaian visionary writing is utopian, like much of biblical literature in the people who are opining about why the world is often so bad, painful and unfair. Although utopian is not a genre usually assigned to biblical writing, it should be. A mythical Eden of total harmonic innocence lost and then longed for again in the Isaian utopian vision of perfect non-predatory relationships in the world. Utopia is no such place; but we use utopia as an analgesic discourse to survive the conditions of freedom which involve harm, aging, loss, war, injustice and death. We would in the moments of harshness sacrifice all of the conditions of freedom for the utopian totalitarian remake of the world to be a machine of non-predatory goodness. In a more practical sense, we long for the loss of infant/child innocence, a state that can never characterize the adult world that has come to live with the knowledge and experience of good and evil. The Gospel invitation of Jesus to be like a "child" to perceive God's kingdom, means that we can mystically access the original innocence of our births and channel it into the harsh real world of good and evil to beat our lives into an adult counter-part of innocence, holiness.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2019
A discussion provoked by some biblical language is about time and whether the notion of "eternity" is "timelessness" or whether it is the infinite duration of time as everlastingness. Is eternity a synonym for everlasting? Do interior events or essences like dreams and "spirit" and soul refer to a timeless realm or can such only be reported or acknowledged by the prior assumption of time? Utopian or impossible worlds or perpetually "not yet" worlds might be tautological or definitional or mathematical equational certainty presumably open to falsification since the future in time would always mean that everything is open to future falsification. But if eternity is "timelessness" how is eternity open to falsification in everlastingness?
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2019
The fallacy of utopian view is the sheer escapism and the denial of what the conditions of freedom imply. To imagine utopia is to imagine a world without moral significance because things could not be but innocent. This is why the Garden of Eden story needed to include the insight of humanity attaining moral significance through the entrance of dealing with good and evil. The implying that the loss of innocence through making an ignorant decision based upon being tricked by a superior serpent and the loss of an innocent perfect world of perfect harmony is an attempt to attach precise causality to a mystery. Fundamentalists regard this the "fall" to be precisely causative of evil, whereas more sanguine interpreters regard this to be an insightful appreciation of the mystery which is a major question in the moral experience of humanity. In Advent the themes of a better and more innocent word return and yet we know that we cannot return to the innocence of childhood, we can only aspire to the holiness of successful repentance with the help in part of drill sergeants like John the Baptist.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2019
The pain of people, animals and systems in conflict is the situation for the imaginations of impossible conditions of harmony. Wouldn't it be nice if all animals were vegetarians and the predator-prey relationships non-existent. Eden must have been and we lost it and surely there is a power that could restore Edenic conditions. Can total innocence and freedom co-exist? Can human being always already choose to be angels without being innocent robots, bereft of moral significance? It could be that with imagination we dream impossible perfect worlds, "ou-topos," utopia or no such places, as a way to direct the freedom conditions of good and evil and systemic oppositions toward good as being the preferred outcome of freedom and evil be seen as the deprivation of the normalcy of goodness. To conceive of an impossible world where freedom does not exist because of a pre-programming to be "only good," is the entertainment analgesic discourse to provide coping and survival technique in face of the fact that for the most part the strong are taking advantage of the weak.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2019
How could Jesus on the cross be a Messiah? How could the Messiah only be known to those who had an epiphany of the Risen Lord? Why wasn't Jesus a Messiah like David who would at least give Israel control of her own borders? The Advent or Parousia was the "theological correction" completing the notion of the Messiah for those who could not see the Suffering Servant model of the Messiah as being adequate to all of the triumphant imagery for the Messiah. A delayed second coming was the answer proving that the future is open to falsifying almost any held view about what has happened in the past. Openness of the future inspires imaginations.
