Freud's designation of religion as illusion is probably based on his failure and the failure of religionists to properly know the differences between scientific and common sense discourse and discourse which pertains to dreams, myths, faith, love, and poetry. Freud did not believe one could be a scientist and a theist even though he believed strongly in the "truths" of the language manifestations of the unconscious. He had his surrogate theology. We need to free ourselves from either/or thinking about faith and science and resolve it with both/and thinking based upon the truth continuum of the expansive discursive human capacity, which might be religiously justified in the phrase, "And the Word was God."
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2024
Hope is the inescapable orientation to a better future. Religious faiths are built on hope, on what is not yet but what should be. Freud criticized this as the future of an illusion, or mere wishful thinking. He saw such illusions as the grist for his language of the unconscious which if read with a guiding therapist could provide insights for our current behaviors so it is concerned with how our past determines our present and how we live with our past in the present. Faith and hope work together to be related to how we want to surpass ourselves in excellence in the future. How can we be more concerned about a better determining future than be morbidly burdened by an over-determining past?
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2024
Idealism, perfection, and Utopia vision present us with what is not and what cannot be, because everything in contrast is imperfect, sick, and far from ideal. When we are sick in particular ways, we wish to know specific health and recovery. Such recovery may not come when death happens or it may come in various ways with different time frames or it may come only partially requiring us to cope and live with "partial healthful condition." The way to rid ourselves of idealism, perfection, and the utopian as haunting genres is to pretend that "hope" can be somehow psycho-surgically removed from the human experience. And if such procedure could be accomplished, what we would have is the surrogate hope beyond the hope that was removed.
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2024
Is death the ultimate disease or sickness? If so, we mostly want to have the opportunity to live within the statistical norms of life expectancy and we may designate "early" death as untimely. On the way to the ultimate sickness of death, we are vulnerable to varying degrees of states of unhealthiness some of which drastically interrupt our normal life patterns and the lives of people who are close to us. We learn to live as long as possible with unresolvable health issues even as we have the occasion to experience fortunate cures from certain debilitating conditions. The cures of Jesus are regarded to be uncanny events defying the expected logical patterns of certain diseases. We often forget that to be cured is to be healed temporarily to still undergo the final sickness of death. We may get trapped in some strange theodicy if we think that we know the magic formula for why some people have uncanny cures and the vast majority do not.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2024
Sickness is many faceted. It is a disruption in what is consider the normal condition of not being sick. There is the biblical sense that our world is perpetually sick in need of constant healing because of the condition of "sin." While the "healings" of Jesus are stories of individuals' physical, mental, or spiritual conditions, as textual function, they imply the presence of Christ co-exists with our varying states of illness with salvation based upon our existing in everlastingness meaning perfection or health or salvation is the experience of completeness of being with everything else, past, present and future. That may not be sufficient in the moments of felt forsakenness of pain and suffering. But then even the sense of forsakenness and suffering cannot be separated from the completeness of everything.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2024
The Bible includes accounts of the common human crisis of sickness, in all of its forms. Sickness is when one's health is experienced as a significant detriment to one's quality of life or of one's immediate community. It's not true to say that Jesus cured and cures all sickness. What are we to make of the seemingly selective few who receive uncanny "cures" from health issues contrasted with those who did and do not? Faithful people can have longstanding illness and all faithful people also die, even if they receive the resurrection death cure. It behooves us not to overly literalize the healing stories of Jesus and be involved in theodicy nightmares because of such literalism. Jesus can be understood to be a healer in coping with the general condition of sickness in time meaning everyone and each of their body organs have a shelf life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2024
A Yogism goes, "baseball is 90% mental; the other half is physical." One might say something similar about health. How much bad health has been facilitated by terrible nurturing contributing to the mental making the physical more vulnerable to be sick in various ways?
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2024
Change and probable outcomes are the challenges of living by faith or being persuaded about meaningful purposes.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2024
We can make the Bible a very foreign book if we treat the writers as those who did not know the difference between aesthetic spiritual writing and common sense observation of what happens in life.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2024
Do language products such as speech acts, written products, and the body action choreography acts, change the reservoir of language from which they derived because the reservoir of language enlarges in time?
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2024
In the calming of the storm on the sea, apparently Jesus worked directly with weather change. What about Jesus working directly upon humanity whose habits have led to climate change and conditions which threaten us now?
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2024
We misread the Bible if we think that biblical writers did not understand the difference between common sense reporting and the genres used in their times to write about their heroes.
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2024
In life we prefer the miracle of bad things not happening to us, as in "I prefer the miracle of not getting cancer in the first place to the miracle to successful response to cancer treatment." What would be the miracle of nothing bad happening at all? In the clash of the free systems among all entities in life, bad things happen and the life of faith, or in Christian terms, the life of knowing Christly presence accompanying us no matter what happens, means living being persuaded about the good triumph of All remaining a sustaining All, no matter what happens.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2024
In pondering the notion of "divine" intervention and the statistical study of what probably can happen, one might want to add the notion of personal relationship with the times of one's life and the experience of "kairos" or eventful time when one has the intermittent experience of the serendipitous fortuitous. One does arrive at such interpretations of events in time as they relate to each other.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2024
Language users can discover that the words of language are meant to refer to things which are not words and yet language users cannot escape the worded interpretive and taxonomical pre-programed cultural screens through which the "non-worded" world is experienced. The non-worded world arrives to us through the mystery of language working within us.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2024
The parables of the kingdom did not make the always already kingdom happened; they describe the serendipitous discoveries of the always, already realm of God.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2024
The "realm or kingdom" tradition of the synoptic Gospels surely invited a comparison of the "worldwide" realm of the Caesar with the realm of God as presented by Jesus and Paul. The Acts of the Apostles quotes Paul as saying, "we live and move and have our being in God." That would mean that all other realms including the Caesars were contained by the greater Realm.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2024
The use of language involves reducing what one experiences to the extent of one's language ability within the context of one's life. This means that one has to offer the perpetual disclaimer about the plenitudinous universe: I just don't know and I might be wrong about what I think I know.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2024
What is the political significance of proclaiming the kingdom or realm of God when the political reality was the kingdom of the Caesar who was regarded to be a god?
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2024
Reading strategy for the New Testament: Read with the possible situations of readers for the years 55-110 C.E., not for the situations for readers in the years 28-31 C.E.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2024
The parable of Jesus are less sayings for his own time but more about how the early Gospel communities were understanding the growing significance of the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2024
A feature of most holy books involve the clash between what has been with what is new which is offered. Since holy books are canonized to being the final say on everything, one is left with the wrong impression that nothing new and surpassing can happen.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2024
Those who wish to be delivered from their prison of anthropomorphism do not wish to be human. However, from our human prisons we can confess our connection with everything which is not human. Our continual perception of being part of a great MORE should keep us humble even while not minimizing the significant good collateral effects of being good and kind.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2024
It may be uneasy for us to admit that the Gospels chronicle in story forms of the life of the ministry of Jesus the process of the Jesus party of Judaism becoming separated from other parties which remained ritually adherent to the Torah. Jesus became associated with the people who did not require ritual adherence in matters of diet and circumcision et. al.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2024
Language is the connecting art by language users with things which are not language but ends up being co-existent with language. The person who claims to have had a pristine experience without language, used "pristine experience without language" to contradict and instantiate the connection of language with all things.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2024
It is easy to say that one's opponent is out of "his mind." Perhaps it is more rhetorically proper to say, "he lives in a completely different thought paradigm than I do."
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2024
The mission of the early followers of Jesus were to comprise themselves as a family beyond the natural family and local ethnic identity. They believed that Jesus proclaimed God as the parent of everyone.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2024
According to the Gospel, Jesus was accused of being out of his mind and in league with Beelzebul. We may be in a similar age of lying when evil is called good and good is called evil.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2024
The principle of the law is to learn to take a rest from the work of doing wrong and harmful things. The entire world needs to take a rest from the work of hatred, war, and greed.
Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2024
At the very least, the Sabbath principle is about the basic principle of rest which is a needed renewal phase for human life. The Sabbath requirement is a legislation of something that is good for our health.
