Aphorism of the Day, April 2024

Aphorism of the Day, April 28,2024

Love believes all, hopes all, bears all.  What would it be like to not have a subject position limited to the relative small and partial experience in space and time and to be perpetually impinged upon without impinging on anything else except to being the pass through in an impinging universe of infinite particulars?

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2024

Vine, light, good shepherd, gate are poetic metaphors for Christ in John's Gospel.  The narrative Gospels themselves are narrative metaphors for the experience of the Risen Christ within the communities which generated the Gospels.

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2024

The everything, everywhere, all at once might be the metaverses of possibilisms which accompanies the actual everything, everywhere all at once which turns out to be interpretations of every language using subject, with each subject having very limited access to the entire field of interpreting subjects.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2024

Treating the New Testament without reference to the mystagogy of the leaders of the churches in the decades after Jesus, is like choosing to describe a wine bottle without reference to or taste analysis of the wine within it.

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2024

If in the metaphor, Jesus is the vine, then does one call the Holy Spirit the "Sap," or the inward connecting essence?

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2024

Holy books include genocide including the killing of all the people on the earth in a great Flood, and the perceived divine injunction to kill all men, women, and children in lands which have been invaded.  Since we cannot remove the memory of genocides on Genocide Day, let the memory of genocides help the prevention of it ever happening again.

Aphorism of the April 23, 20204

God is the axiological highest designation to be used by human beings.

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2024

What arises in the linguistic plane of the prior and co-extensive truth of everything of Word being God, words come to define human language users and their experiences, and one such experience is the human experience of love, and love becomes the chief metaphor for the human superlative, and love is God.  We identify God analogically as that which is humanly superlative.

Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2024

John's Gospel is a book of metaphors for how those who had a mystical relationship with the Risen Christ.  They felt like favored pets taken care of by a good shepherd.

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2024

Be careful about over-extending the meanings of a metaphor.  Jesus as our Good Shepherd in an exact analogical correspondence would mean that we are but God's commodities to be recycled within the created order?

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2024

Good shepherding is the calling of the reciprocal matching of human need and the satisfaction that need.  As people we can be on both sides, having human need and being the ones who can satisfy the human needs of others.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2014

One of the most serious Gospel question today is this, "If the Gospels were written by and for oppressed people in the Roman Empire, how can the teachings of the Gospels be appropriately followed by Christians who have been the "ruling class" of the various empires?"

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2024

What is the limit of a metaphor like good shepherd?  A good shepherd frankly cares for a sheep as a commodity, for wool or the event of the death of a sheep for the mutton for a meal.  I think that we basically use the good shepherd metaphor as us being favorite and well cared for pets of Good Shepherd Jesus.  Good Shepherd=Kind and caring pet owner?

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2024

A great challenge today is how can heirs of empire Christianity really be Christ-like?

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2024

How does the church redeem itself from it over-association with empires?  By being good shepherds, not as being qualitatively different like a human shepherd and a sheep, but by being sheep who have power, knowledge, and wealth, devoted to helping other sheep come to their equal power, knowledge, and wealth.  

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2024

The history of war is a history of how a very few people end up making war decisions on behalf of millions.

Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2024

Alternative facts happens because a person say they happened.  Saying I scored a hole in one when I didn't do so creates what we call dishonesty.  The word facts is a way of citing empirical verifiability.  In our time, the saying of having done something has been the "facts" to support a politician or liar in their immediate effort to bolster their image.  The saying has become the fact; not the empirical verification of what one has said.  This is functional facts for the purpose of promotion of the self-importance of the person who declares the "facts."

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2024

Every event has equality in "having happened."  I really believed that I was eating in a dream.  The dream really happened.  But my eating in a dream is different from me eating when awake.  Dream eating and waking eating share an identity while being totally different.  In profound aesthetic events, moving events, while we are awake, we can have our conscious state tinged with seeming "dream state" kind of sublime energy.  Language creates quite a vast complex continuum from inner-ness to outer-ness and we do well not to oversimplify with a binary subject/object descriptions.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2024

The churches of Empire Christianity have to be honest about the irony of wrongly appropriating the New Testament writings which were written by and for small group of people who were a very marginalized and oppressed population within the Roman Empire.  It is shameless to see people of the American Empire Christianity claim to be persecuted for their personal piety and views because they cannot force through public schools, laws, and government bureaucracy their particular views upon the entire populace.

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2024

The Bible is a book about stories of hope for people who often could not see good reason to be hopeful.  Is there a future for people who know continuous oppression?Biblical faith is holding to the probability of good things as how we want to characterize our lives even while surviving or losing to some the bad things which can happen to us.  Having faith also means embracing the truth of genuine freedom which is necessary for moral authenticity.

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2024

The experience of our senses is given the position of substantiality as being really real.  This is the basis of science.  The Bible also uses the empirical verifiable as a metaphor for the substantiality of the inner, spiritual, invisible, language life.  The spiritual life is as substantial as the outer life; it is a different but equal substantiality.  We don't have to pit science against religion to appreciate that the Bible was not making scientific meanings.

Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2024

The world outside of us that is accessible through our senses is regarded to be what is substantially objective in being verifiably available to everyone.  The New Testament writers saw the accessible outside objective world as a metaphor of substantiality for the inward and invisible world of language through which the entire outer world was mediated, as in everything came into being through the Word.

 Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2024

The text of the Bible which seems to have a degree of stable permanence, has never been able to fix permanent meanings of the "fixed" text.  The texts were written from interpretative views and so they end up have endless interpretive views.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2024

Yesterday is re-invented through clarification by today, because contrast over time re-creates what we once thought yesterday was.

Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2024

St. Paul wrote that at the last trumpet, mortal bodies will be changed into immortal bodies.  We could write and talk forever about what this means and still not know what it means from actual experience.  From the experience of being in time we cannot understand what not having time would mean.

Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2024

Paul's post-resurrection appearance of Christ was significantly different than the appearances recorded in the Gospel.  He did not see Jesus in the flesh but his conversion experience had very physical ramification for his body language thereafter.

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2024

Resurrection, transmogrification of the soul, reincarnation, immortality of the soul are all important insights because human death really effects people.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2024

Resurrection is another way of saying continuous sustaining new life and it often means adjusting to events of starkly different life.  Life will alway go on and on; our tasks is to get into the flow with our volitional shaping of the expression of life toward love and justice within the human community.

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2024

Many Bible readers go the wrong direction in arriving at meanings.  They use spiritual writings to assert the events narratives could have been empirically verified even if such event do not comport to nature laws.