Aphorism of the Day, March 2024

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2024

Easter is a celebration of continuity when death seems like the event of greatest discontinuity because it leave no appearance that a once living person has obvious apparent personal continuity after death.  Continuity is most registered in words riding on memorial traces, and we may all have to return to the great reservoir of Word itself to be retained in Christ the Word.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2024

For many, the Gospels have been reduced to detailed empirically verifiable events instead of the later visualizations of the presence of the Risen Christ within one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2024

Being honest about the Passion accounts means understanding them as the visualization presentations of  Jesus Movement leaders from the years 70 to 90 or so C.E. to provide a genre for the much earlier spiritual identity mysticism of persons like Paul who wrote that he had been crucified with Christ.  

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2024

A public meal is the central liturgy of the church.  It has become so stylized and one has to have incredible faith to believe that most communion bread is actually bread.  What is practical value of a public meal?  Making sure that every one has adequate food to eat.  If we divorce the feeding of the needy public from the Eucharist, the Eucharist loses its "agape" nature.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2024

The irony of life is that the meaningful truth of one does not function as such for other people.  Meaningful truth functions within the solidarity of community.  One can understand how scientists favor "meaningful truth criteria" that can be verified by any community.  The meaningful truth criteria which pertains to religious and aesthetic discourse tends to be more verified within particular communities with people converted to prior commitments that are not opened to the method of falsification as is required by the tentative conclusions which prevail in science until a better explanation is discovered.

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2024

Nietzsche referred to truth as "well-worn metaphors," meaning that truth is culturally established through repeated use.  This might make "truth" seem to be a function of mob hits, like internet hits totals determining what is really true or factual.  The renewal of past traces in time bespeaks the current pragmatic relevance of a past trace having longevity in truth value.  The unfolding relevance of ancient text often was registered based upon the re-inking of fading texts upon papyrus.  If a text was being used, such use was seen in a community re-inking the text.  Today metaphors are not so much "re-inked" as they are naturally deconstructed through the processes of language by language users.  Biblical texts are used in different ways by biblical readers depending upon the circumstances of the many variety of readers.  A metaphor which does not wear out is this, "language is, therefore everyone else comes to be known to be."

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2024

Too many people regard Scriptures to be like a "mirror" of what actually happened in the past and a predictive "mirror" of what will precisely happen in the future.  It is actually literature, a written art form, written evocatively, to provide the continual occasions for reader projections upon it in an interaction to evoke meaningful identities.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2024

Long before the Ignatian method of visualizations of events in the life of Jesus, the Gospels themselves were visualizations of the life of Jesus and therefore part of the spiritual method of the early Jesus Movement communities.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2024

AI is inevitable when the proliferation of world knowledge cannot be maintained and usefully manipulated by simply human memory capacity.   In times past, seeming omni-competent people could command most of the world knowledge of the time. In the morass of information today tribal leaders do the thinking on behalf of their constituents and not for the common good of the alliance of all "tribes" but for narrow parochial interests often with the goal of raising funds for the tribal leader continued power and well being.  Frightening to think that what interests many in AI is its propaganda potential and the options of endless alternative facts.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2024

AI is the compilation of memory traces of human data on a massive scale which can be continuously juxtaposed units to reveal pragmatic syntheses coupled with technological action plans to make the total number historical units of memory accessible in creating products for human use.  If AI is also expressive of "garbage in, garbage out," then how can AI be guided toward, "do no harm," be kind, be just, provide enough for everyone?  Can we input justice into the AI requirement?  

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2024

The barrage of information today challenges us with the problem of people not having the capacity to deal effectively with the complexity in the expanding world knowledge. The easiest solution for many is to simply be involved only with one's own small tribe and subscribe to the talking points of the leaders of the tribe.  Now we have the phenomenon of "alternative" facts which means "tribal" facts, or how reality is parsed according to one's tribal view.  Scientific standards are the most reliable for group objectivity, and converting the method of science to law, history, and news reporting discourse has meant there were valid ways of establishing what actually happens.  In the media of the internet age, everyone is a reporter and photographer, and everyone can portray any view as having seeming equal validity.  With the proliferation of news reporter and lack of policing about reporting criteria, "facts" are presented as commodities on behalf of a political ideology.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2024

Rumi used a figurative story about various blind men in contact with an elephant and describing it from their particular perspective of the elephant part accessible to each, but not being able to name or know the huge mammoth.  The figurative story names the elephant which indicates the limitation of the metaphor since only Plentitude could know or name Plenitude.  The story is a reminder that there is always MORE to what I experienced, you experienced, and what everyone has experienced, all together, all at once.  We only inhabit but an micro-nano-spot of the great MORE.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2024

The covenant we have with nature needs to be two ways.  What will nature do for us? Feed us and provide us with what we need to exist.  What will we do for nature?  Will we treat it well so it can continue to sustain into the future?

 Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2024

With language we have come to explore the behaviors of the world towards us in the continual development of natural laws.  One could say the articulation of such natural laws is the languaged projection upon the world which confronts us and it is the expression of the covenant of the total environment toward us.  Even without invoking the name of God, we can accept that we project upon the All a covenant relationship in terms of what it promises to us.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2024

God's omnipresence might best be understood as human being possessed with language ability and from this ability projecting words upon everything else even using like everything else as a negligible.  If something does escape language, we cannot know it except by language declaring a mysterious state of escaping language.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2024

Everyone is called to be priestly in that all our lives are lived as offered.  We become priestly through intentionally offering our lives as belonging in solidarity with all.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2024

Noted contrast.  The Ides of March is the death of Julius Caesar who was also a declared god.  The death of Jesus in contrast is remembered by a continuously reconstituted group of followers who changed a historical event into a spiritual process as seen in the Pauline confession, "I have been crucified with Christ."  Is anyone saying, "I have died with Julius Caesar?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2024

The writer of Jeremiah wrote about a new covenant of the law being written upon the heart.  This new covenant is appropriated by New Testament writers as the law of Spirit accessible to everyone.  In practice there often seems to be a disconnect between Spirit and the people who are channeling this Spirit.  Can Spirit be the overcoming of the continuous deconstruction which happens in language use?

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2024

Language is used by people to constitute their identity within contexts.  Biblical language was generated to constitute the identity of people in various places regarding a "transcendental," or a mystery of how promulgated values regarded to be superlative could reconfigure the inner language of people and result in behaviors which are consistent with the superlative values.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2024

In a metaphor, the words of Jesus compares a seed which dies and becomes a plant with what will happen to him.  Does the plant have continuity with the seed from which it came?  Indeed, but it is noticeably different.  The post-death state of Jesus and everyone is quite different.  In the case of Jesus, some people got to experience Risen Christ appearances.  In the case of our departed loved ones, it remains mostly not yet in such appearances, save for memories, dream apparitions, and our mourning as proof that our loved one was indeed here.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2024

Preachers most often use the Gospels as eye-witness accounts, whereas the writing provenance of the Gospels make them more about the issues of the early Jesus Movement communities encoded in narratives about Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2024

If those who have died are lucky they don't escape being in the language of the thoughts of the memories re-manifested in those who knew them, and perhaps even in those who didn't.  Who knows where the energy concrescence of selfhood goes and travels and in what varied forms?

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2024

Some would like to "escape" language by pretending that silence or any human life expression or activity could be known without first assuming language.

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2024

To blame a politician for being political is like blaming a fish for being in water.  The question is "for what polis" does a politician speak and legislate?   Is it for a true common good, for the largest number of people, or is it for only a local tribe?

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2024

Meaning is the differentiation of value that a person has learned within their community to place upon the events which occur to them.  Meaning is not final because in time meanings create and give birth to new variations in meaning.  Therefore finality in meaning cannot be fixed.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2024

The present brings into existence a new past in how the past is assessed.  The past can only be dealt with from the now because we cannot be anywhere else.  History is the practice of anachronism since we cannot avoid import our questions from life now onto the historical traces which we have received.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2024

The appearance of writing was magical in that it could be the trace of someone actually speaking without being there.  The appearance of writing created orality since when only orality existed, it is not known as such because it is not yet contrasted with having writing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2024

Reading the Bible not about reading eye witness accounts of things which could be empirically verifiable, it is about appreciating the symbolic codes used for scribal leaders (the Bible is writing) to promote community identity as that identity related to the highest values of the community, which in the case of the early Christians was the mystagogy of the Risen "Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2024

With language a person is trying to manifest the connection of everything that is within oneself with everything that is outside of one epidermis and sensory portals.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2024

The Bible is a collection of writings which were preserved and elevated to a place of community importance instantiated by the legacy of values which readers perceived and deemed worthy of promulgating and passing on to the next generation.  Within the entire universe of existing texts now, the biblical writings get evaluated among the vast amount of world knowledge.  The quantity of world knowledge necessarily changes the place and value and functional use of all previous literature, and the Bible too is subject to constantly being seen differently in the expansion of the universe of knowledge.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2024

Writing and speaking can only be done in a fragmentary way since what we say and write is a miniscule  portion of the possible linguistic universe of everything which might come to language.  What we say and write is also imprisoned by the particular paradigms in which we find ourselves located.  We at all times should humbly admit that there is a great MORE universe of language which can dissolve our miniscule language efforts leaving our language constructs deconstructed by greater contexts.  The fact of the smallness of our language products being dissolved by existing within a great MORE, should not diminish our efforts to make them comply with what we regard to be highest, namely, what love and justice in word and deed can mean within our limited contexts.