Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2022
Words Jesus logic: God is the God of the living. Hence nothing ever dies? In this logic change does not mean death, it only means transformed to something of some future state of difference than how one/it was previously manifested.
Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2022
If religion is having a group identity which stands in the place of doing love and justice, then it is group deception.
Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2022
The Gospels often portray Jesus as reaching out to people who do not have significant social or religious advocacy. There are people of power and greed who make people fall between the cracks, and there are people who lift up people who have fallen between the cracks and those are the Jesus-people.
Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2002
"I'm not religious but spiritual" is less accessible than "I'm not religious, but I have faith." "Spiritual" is but a metaphor for mystery of some notion of inner being; whereas faith as persuasion is known by the actual priorities of our lives and so one can identify one's "faith values" by being honest about one's priorities.
Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2022
Everyone has faith, if faith means "persuasion." Everyone is persuaded and it shows in their life values spoken and lived. The question becomes which are the best values to be persuaded about and what would count as good reasons for holding one's highest values. We might promote love and justice as the highest values for the most people and then promote the persuasive lures that can get us there? It is terribly counter-productive for promoting Jesus as the lodestar of our values if we are using "Jesus-persuasion" language in words and deeds to go against love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2022
Zacchaeus was a Jesus-voyeur from his tree perch. Watching others who don't know that we're watching them. Being watched by people whom we don't know are watching us. People watching happens which is why we should act as though our behaviors could model recommended behaviors for love or justice, or as expressed by the Kantian categorical imperative, to do something that one could wish to be a human universal.
Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2022
The Gospels often portray the opponents of Jesus referring to the fact that Jesus hung out with "sinners." Sinner can easily be used to designate the "other," the one who is not in our group. The negative aspect of such use of sinner is that implies that God too stamps one's opponent as a sinner. This misuse of God as designating the people whom I find disagreeable as sinners was the attitude of contempt which Jesus was exposing as not being worthy of God or true loving faith.
Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2022
Zacchaeus, a converted tax collector, represents the end outcome of conversion. Conversion means deliverance from dishonest greed and restoration and reparation for all previous dishonest transactions. If wealthy greedy society wants to be converted and since our court has called social units like corporations, persons, then social persons who have exploited the poor and who have enslaved and invaded, need to have their Zacchaeus moment and begin the work of reparation.
Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2022
One of the reasons to be merciful is that humility of accepting our limited knowledge of other peoples inner and outer, past and present circumstances which comprises their lives. We don't like to be judge by person who don't know us and our circumstances well. Mercy begins by not imputing bad motives for the actions and words of other people.
Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2022
We can regard ourselves vis a vis other as those who do not need as much mercy as other people. We should not confuse juridical mercy with divine mercy; everyone needs divine mercy for divine clemency which God allows us in always being able to get better. In terms of juridical mercy in citizenship behaviors persons may be at significant different places of needing amendment of life and degrees of reparative requirements.
Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2022
If one's sense of being right is coupled with a contempt for those whom one believes is wrong or not in good standing with God, then such a one has lost the sense of being on a path of becoming better in the future. If we are measuring ourselves with the self-surpassing selves of the future then we are humbly admitting perpetual lack and our own disqualification for judging the individual paths of other people. Such faith journeys in perfectability are not incompatible with the juridical rights and wrongs needed for law and order in society.
Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2022
In our primary naïveté, we read the Gospels as if they were reporting exact people and events contemporary with Jesus of Nazareth. Our secondary naïveté involves being informed that Jesus traditions were being shaped and applied to the dynamics in the early Christ-communities several decades after Jesus lived.
Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2022
People who read Scriptures do so on the continuum of words of disfavor to words of favor. Because of presumed sense of favoritism, and downright ethnocentrism, most people read the Scriptures as I/we are the good and favored ones as we project our own desire for favor on biblical words. Conversely, those who seems to be in our disfavor or "enemy" categories are identified with the disapproving words of Scripture. It should be admitted that Scripture is read mainly, "selfishly." Even the words we receive as "personal rebukes," are received as favoring our amendment to live better lives. And sometimes we don't ponder that those in our disfavor are amending their lives too.
Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2022
Three Gospels have P's in P, parables within the Parable of the narrative life of Jesus. Teaching about Jesus teaching about life through an allegorical method. The big Parable of the life of Jesus is presented with roman a clef features because believable empirical features point to the substantiality of the chief faith issues of the Gospel writers. The P's in P mode is not used in John's Gospel where the author uses vignettes of Jesus as the occasion for longer discourses explicating the mysticism of the Johannine community.
Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2022
It could be that the Jesus Movement used the Gospel genre as a means of communicating the life of Jesus in parable form and his parables are like parables within the parable presentation of his life narrative. A tax collector as a "lapsed" Jew, could represent a group of people who had Jewish heritage but for business relationship with the Romans could not maintain the ritual purity required by adherent Jews. So this target group of "sinners," publicans, and tax collector became symbolic of one of the groups of people who were embracing the ritual dispensing followers of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2002
The events of life in the freedom abroad often seem like a recalcitrant unjust judge, and it can appear that evil is actually winning. Jesus said that we should be like a faithful nagging widow crying out against the seeming deprivation of the normalcy of justice. The total ground of becoming allows both the unjust and the just; the message of faith is to be naggers and doers of justice.
Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2022
Odd that Jesus would compare having faith and prayer to a nagging widow wanting justice. In the world of freedom where much that happens is freely unjust and bad, we need to be deliberate, intentional, and continuous naggers for what is just and good. And when we have power to speak and do justice, we need to back up our nagging with practice of what is right.
Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2022
The parable of Jesus about the widow and the unjust judge, presents prayer as a continuous holy nagging. If we are nagging God, the cosmos, and all in our situation about justice, then we hope the cumulative effect will bring events of justice to fruition. Keep nagging, but do it for justice.
Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2022
In the field of probable occurrences, it often seems as though we are facing unjust judges in facing such unfavorable conditions. In such situations, the words of Jesus encourage us to continue to offer nagging prayers which are anchored upon a persuasion about just and loving outcomes.
Aphorism of the Day, October 12, 2022
When the Son of Man comes will he find faith? Will the future self-surpassing humanity arrives, will faith as living being persuaded about the high values of love and justice be the result of finally learning our lesson?
Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2022
What does the conditions of freedom in the field of probabilities seem like? They can seem favorable to one's lifestyle, unfavorable, or without caring personality. We cannot extricate our own freedom from the field of freedom in what is and will happen to us. The question is: How do we use our freedom to fill the field of future probability. With prayers, some of which include us being the answer to our own prayers with action, but also the endless "Hail Mary" prayer nagging the seeming crooked judges determining probabilities. Nagging prayers fills the ballot box of future probabilities and helps to bend the arc of future probability to be favorable toward justice and love. So, keep nagging.
Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2022
The "weakness" of God would be in the divine refusal to interfere with freedom in the world and so the conditions of the world in part are left to the "democracy" of the free agents of the world to choose good and resist evil. Sometimes it seems as though the good side is losing, except the entire all resides within a totally expanding Container which is more than any relative situations of seeming triumph of evil.
Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2022
The Gospel stories of Jesus are another level of parable, and the parables of Jesus are parables within the parables of presentations of stories which encapsulate and encode the spiritual practices of the early communities. The Gospel is a genre which has developed the sheer didactic mode of Paul and his mystical theology into a narrative of Jesus of Nazareth.
Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2022
An aspect of the Gospel was the not so subtle message that foreigners were returning to give thanks to God. When we think that we have a "lock" on God, we need to remember that people who are foreign to us are giving thanks to God is ways which we might miss because we are biased.
Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2022
Faith as persuasion has more to do with the Persuader's Values who informs the direction and quality of being persuaded, i.e., having beliefs. If those values don't include love and justice for all, then one is shooting one's arrow at the wrong target.
Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2022
Having one's persuasion focused on and defined by Jesus and his values is what the health of salvation meant in the early Christ communities.
Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2022
"Your faith has made you well." How does faith make us well? If we reduce wellness to a "cure in time" then we are perhaps never well since the process of entropy toward death would imply that we are never really well, in terms of being freed from the shelf-life expire dates on various aspects of our physical lives. Faith making us well has to do with our being persuaded in time always about another future with a variety of personal and social continuities based upon the grand hunch of hope that we will know ourselves and others into an indefinite future.
Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2022
If St. Francis is one of the very few who practiced Christ-likeness, there certainly are not many Christ-like people who claim to be Christian. O we say, but we did not have the same calling as Jesus or Francis.
Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2022
The message of Jesus is that health and healing belongs to everyone including the people who are regarded by one's society as being enemies. Yes, rain and sun is available to everyone following the probabilities of the conditions in contextual situation. We are very presumptuous if we try to limit what God is love means.
Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2022
Pragmatism means that true value must include functional outcomes. The same is true of faith; casting trees into the sea is not really a functional outcome; feeding and clothing people is a functional truth of faith.
Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2022
One needs to treat the words of Jesus as literary artistic words evoking the truth of moral, spiritual, and faith actions and not a language of empirical verifiable phenomenon.
