Aphorism of the Day, December 2022

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2022

A last calendar day; an artificial way of defining time as our futile efforts of controlling the stream of time which is continuous and has no such divisions except the story divisions which humans give it.  A calendar is a way of trying to give human meaning to the time of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2022

The rationale of names in the Bible is to connect event or meaning of life within a name.  Jesus, or Jeshua, or Joshua, means the Lord is Salvation.  Salvation refers to the holistic health for the peoples of the earth and includes "afterlife" health as a complement for what doesn't quite attain full health in this life.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2022

A name of a person is a most holy reduction.  All of the continuous states of becoming past, present, and future are reduced to a single name.   This abstraction from the states of becoming is indeed a reduction but it is holy in that it celebrate the continuity of identity through all the states of becoming.  But such reduction should not transgressed the rich varied differences in the states of becoming within a "unified" continuous individual.  The name Jesus was given on his eighth day even though later would confess Christ as all and in all.  This is indeed a pleroma of designated states of becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2022

The Feast of the Holy Innocent is a reminder that children and the vulnerable become the collateral victims of adult tyrants and very bad adult policies, like our lack of reasonable gun laws.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2022

Trying to escape being a language user is impossible because any attempt already presumes the use of language or already being ordered by it.  Word made flesh means that word and material are co-extensive in human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2022

One of the names of Christ is Word from the Beginning who is God.  It is appropriate that God and Word are co-extensive since word is what is more humanly unavoidably valued.  The reflexive irony is that we cannot even speak about Word without the prior assumption of Word.  Try to imagine anything without first assuming prior word ability.

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2022

The incarnation is a particular divine immanence to announce the always already reality of divine omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2022

The Christmas Story: what is unbelievable through the lens of empirical verification is believable through the lens of literary criticism which locates the artistic purpose of the story to encode the undeniable Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2022

The greatest error in religion is when people refuse to acknowledge the difference between texts of empirical verification and aesthetic and artistic and spiritual discourse.  To confuse discursive practice has led to all kinds of folly.  All language users have diverse discursive practice.  Wisdom comes knowing when and where to use a particular discursive practice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2022

Many words in art, poetry, religion, and the visionary images of cinema do not conform to the standards of empirical verification and yet we don't say that such presentations are humanly untrue.  Such words have a different truth function than the words of a scientific theorem.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2022

The unbelievability of the birth of Christ is to challenge the discourse of science and empirical verification as being the only and superior truth discourse.  The discourse of wonder co-exists with empirical verification, not to deny it but to inspire beauties of the heart or inward thinking which lead to the moral beauties of love and justice and care in our practice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2022

What makes the incarnation unbelievable is actually the always already of the Sublime inhabiting human experience.  The incarnation is a signifying reminder of what has always been.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2022

Incarnation and creation.  The Christian metaphor of God being completely in a baby Jesus bespeaks of God being completely with us in the Beginning.  Creation and Incarnation can be appropriated as Sameness within Diversity.  The Sameness of God happens in God omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2022

Why did the Gospel writers write the birth of Jesus as a fantasia of angels, shepherds, magi in beautiful magic realism?  It was a profound artistic way to put in story form the wonder of the birth of the Risen Christ within each soul.

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2022

The infancy narrative about the birth of Jesus were written as an "as if" narrative using the presentation of the an actual event to indicate the substantiality of the inward spiritual birth of Christ within the lives of the early Christ communities.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2022

A main vocation in life is to know oneself as a language user among other language users and to study why one and others brings to language forms in orality, writing, and body language deeds the "language products" of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2022

Religions are essentially for community identity to give transcendental legitimacy for a community's right to exist.  Such transcendental ideology provides social cohesion and is useful in uniting against other tribes with different community identities, based on different transcendental ideology.  The modern age juxtaposes various communities with hyper awareness of the "others" presence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2022

Is it a coincidence that two men named Joseph in the Bible received dream communication from God?

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2022

The Bible presents dreams as a way in which God directly communicated to people.  We don't seem to give such divine authority to dreams today.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2022

As much as we enjoy the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, they also are spiritual manuals for the early churches to teach about how the Risen Christ is known to be born within each person.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2022

Immanuel is a name which states the ancient creation story of humanity bearing the image of the creator.  The generalized image of the divine on creation has moments of becoming more apparent, and for the Gospels, Jesus was the most apparent case.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2022

The Magnifcat remains unfulfilled and is an eternal witness against the exploiters of the poor and vulnerable, including those who don't think they are doing it because of the blindness of the banality of their class blindness.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2022

The solipsistic insight is that each person presides over one's own universe, one in which as the chimerical self participates in limited freedom in having one's existence impinged upon by the contextual linguistic structures where one has been thrown.  Such individual universe ceases to exist at one's death for those who had heretofore had lifely access to.  As to continuity in other manifestations of that unique universe in the deathly future, one cannot pretend to have much specific knowledge.  Personal apocalypse is one's own death which can happen anytime within the probable human conditions.  One of the functional meaning of generalizing personal apocalyptic to corporate or social apocalypse would be to imagine an end to some intolerable conditions for a group of people who need the visualization of their corporately shared suffering ending in order to survive the harshness of horrendous life probabilities.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2022

Without being temporally provincial, we living in the present as the latest time, know our time to be  superior to the past in terms of quantity of occasions of experiences and it is the ever contemporary task to add quality to the time of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2022

Words of the Risen Christ channeled in the early churches state that John the Baptist was the greatest born of women, but least born into the kingdom of heaven was greater.  This is hyperbole-speak for contrasting spiritual and natural births.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2022

Patience is related to self-control; it is having impulse control to wait for future timing of something to come, arrive, or happen regarding one's well being.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2022

The irony of wanting universal regard means that the sense of one's special favor has to be transferable for everyone to know the same sense of favor.  The easy way out is to be merely ethnocentric and live as though only our group is God's favorite.

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2022

The realm of God in time means that the present is always the latest time and as such surpasses in occasions of time all preceding events.  The latest is the greatest as such in quantity of time and the human work is to make the latest qualitatively good time in re-contextualizing everything that went before and serving up remnants of memorial traces with new applied recipes of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2022

A prophet is one who is aloof from the banalities of evil and neglects of goodness, to rebuke and point the way to better living.  A prophets hopes to make goodness banal in the place of unrecognized bad habits.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2022

Hermeneutical laziness accounts for the break down between science and religion.  Failure to appreciate that biblical writings were omni-competent literature for ancient people which included lots of utopian images, wish fulfillment texts, and heroic final intervention stories.  After science became our predominant way of living with probabilities based upon empirical verification, such dominance became the preferred truth criteria.  So, religionists responded by starting to act as though all ancient texts recounted events which could have been empirically verified.  We've been caught in a war between aesthetic truth/story/mythic truth and scientific truth.  We can be both aesthetes and scientists.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2002

Much of biblical writing could be characterized as "wish fulfillment."  For example the Lord God intervening to care for the poor and the downcast in physical ways, and the utopian visions of how life might be better.  It is humanly true to want to know more ideal conditions; the issue of faith is how to implement in incremental ways toward the ideal conditions.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2022

Freud referred to religion as the wish fulfillment and the future of illusion.  He perhaps wished to cordon off science from religion as having a different kind of superior truth value, even though it is undeniable that people live by such "illusions" as love, justice, and world peace.  These things have no complete empirically verifiable content, but apparently people know when they partake of experiences such things as love, justice, and peace.  Future illusions of love, justice, and peace continue to have functional truth relevance.