Aphorism of the Day, November 2022

Aphorism of the Day, November 30, 2022

In many ways the Bible is a book of utopias and utopian people and the stark contrast of people failing at utopia and failing to be utopian people (angelic) and needing prophets to remind us to strive for the utopian direction rather than the dystopian direction.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2022

Through human imagination we torture ourselves with visions of utopia and utopian people as unattainable states.  Why?  We need to establish the right direction toward incremental surpassing of ourselves in excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2022

Prophets are those who often stand out like a sore thumb because they reveal the banality of tacit neglect of the ideals and anger people who are blindly coopted by the habits of neglecting the ideals.

Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2022

Before the advent of modern science, the field of what knowing meant was not as divided between what is out there and what is within.  Since we tend to be temporally provincial in our limitation we are tempted to import the epistemology of our age back to the ancient people.

Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2022

Apocalyptic writings were "relief" literature for suffering people who needed to visualize the end of suffering.  It is quite amazing how Christian groups use it today to assume that God is going to let their side eventually win.  It might be called selfish apocalyptic.

Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2022

Death is intermittent and can be a personal "rapture," since when one is "taken" in death, there are many others left behind.  And we cannot predict the time of those who are "taken."

Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2002

Being thankful involves the commitment to give as many people as possible the occasion to be thankful too.  We dare not reduce thanksgiving to the pride of our own privilege in the middle of others who lack.

Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2022

Hope creates "utopias," like the thought of swords being converted to plowshares in some ideal future.  The ideal functions as informing a perfect direction of love and justice, even when the reality of human freedom means that there will never be human unanimity in choosing such a perfect outcome.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2022

If humanity lives and has being in God, then nothing can be outside of God the Great Container of all.

Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2022

Visualizations of endings and beyond ending are motivational presentation to influence how we live now.  Non-existence and not-having-language cannot be visualized because such thing presuppose existence always and having language.  Reducing continuous occurrences to beginning and endings is the story reflex which we all much live by in language because language is a presentation of everything that is not language with language.

Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2022

Kingly as a metaphor for top of the human hierarchy needs to be dissociated from the trappings of the wealth and power of earthly kings and re-defined as embodiment of love and justice.  This is how Christ is kingly, and how we should be as well.

 Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2022

We need to deconstruct "Christ as King" in our time and find correspondences in our time to explicate what would be "kingly" in our time.

Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2022

Christ as King was contextually meaningful and ironic at that.  Finding correspondence for the metaphor of king in our context to be meaningful involves many leaps through ironic hoops.  It's easier to go into a Disneyesque primary naivete and just romanticize the notion of a good king.

Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2022

To grapple with the functional efficiency of using the metaphor of king for Christ in our age is akin to writing about the importance of the Cadillac to the first century world.  One has to make some adjustments in finding correspondence.

Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2022

The notion of a king has lost it use as a positive metaphor in the age of democracy.  Should we update its use as fitting for God and Jesus with the use of "enlightened leader" instead?

Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2022

For Americans, the notion of a king is uncomfortable.  The history of kings indicate the cruel or even boring kings outnumber the benign kindly caring leader.  Christian symbol makers present Jesus as the ideal king, but ironically, a king who has to winsomely gain accession within the heart of each individual as one's true lodestar person.

Aphorism of the November 14, 2022

The notion of Jesus as King is totally ironic, as the posted words on the cross read, "This is the King of the Jews."  Such designation defies the logical definition of the accepted meaning of "king."

Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2022

The Omnipresence of God means that God's presence cannot be exhaustively limited to a Temple or Holy Book.  God's presence is evenly dispersed even though in human experience we designate qualitative differences in perception of divine presence due to our receptive capacity in specific times and spaces.

Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2022

Apparently God is not a protector of edifices, if the sacred Temple was destroyed various times.  How is it that the "official" earthly residence of God in the holiest of holies was not protected?  The Gospel writers using the words of Jesus interpreted the demise of the Temple as a significant paradigm switch regarding divine presence residing in the human body as the "original" temple of the Holy Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2022

For those who hold to literal biblical end of the world scenarios, one finds that they see no need to love this world's environment and care for it.   It is an arrogant, "God will save us in the rapture," so what if the environment is polluted."

Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2022

"Apocalypse" is an unveiling or revealing.  In the Bible it is imagining all kinds of future probability so that we can have revealed to us now the way Christ is always coming to us.

Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2022

The words Jesus opposed those who were sure that they knew when the end was to occur.  Many people in 2000 years have seem to be certain about the end of the world.  It is safer to say that life as we know is and will always be changing.  Changes are ends and new beginning.

Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2022

The words of Jesus were spoken against people who claimed to know about some final end.  He pointed to the kind of happenings which always are happening as the occasion for the event of one of many comings of the Christ Nature being realized.

Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2022

The signs referred in the words of Jesus about the last days are signs which have always been present in human experience.  For this reason, one should consider switching "last days" to the "latest days."  We always live in the "latest days" with multiple challenges to the conditions of good people facing evil harm as well as the usual mistiming of natural disasters.  Apocalyptic realism is to have faith about the ever arrivals of the Risen Christ into the events of one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2022

The words of Jesus about people in the resurrection: They are like angels.  The Risen Christ in the appearance accounts seems to behave more like the accounts of angel manifestations.  The use of metaphorical language should teach not to be "precise" about any unseen thing.  Speaking about hope and beauty does not render precise language about empirically verified things but about things felt.

Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2022

The words of Jesus declare God as a God of the living and it is an expansive use of the word living in that it includes everyone and everything that has died.

Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2022

How can belief in the resurrection be misused?  For hating the world as it is.  As an escape.  As pride that God is on my side and will verify that by denying resurrection to a good place for my enemies.

Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2022

Levirate marriage required a widow to be re-married to a brother-in-law to make the dead brother "objectively immortal" in the resulting offspring.  Jesus said that children of the resurrection did not have such same "objectively immortal" requirements since what we leave behind though very significant and telling will still soon be forgotten. Being re-constituted in God's great memory is what metaphorically describes a child of the resurrection.

Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2022

On All Souls' Day, it's good to remember that everyone who existed has an absolute past but no one's life in its fullness is known or remembered forever within the community which lives.  We commit all un-remembered lives to the God of great memory, whose memory is able to reconstitute them into their better selves.  We hope that the future afterlife means having freedom to get better living within the memory of God.

Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2022

It seems as those who seek the fame of infamy in an informational age when so many want to be the informational item continuously.  Good to remember the saints who became famous by not trying to be so, but by just doing good.