Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2024
The American experience in part was formed as a system to "keep Christians in charitable practice with others." In short, opposing Christian groups were not to burn their religious opponents at the stake. American Christians are people of faith often divided by having a common founder, Jesus. In the establishment or our Constitution, not any religious group was given the authority to impose their habits of belief and practice on anyone else. Obviously, the framers learned from European religious persecution, and the history in the colonies of events like the "witch" trials (or males with power to punish women for being different than men wanted them to be) in Salem.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2024
Theology is a movement between the macroscopic and microscopic, but it is mostly microscopic projection upon the mysterious macroscopic which is the certainty of the Great Negligible without having precise ability to know it except in how it gets funneled into the bits of the anthropomorphic of the microscopic life of human language.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2024
Counter dynamics occur when narrowing identity features of our lives like country, region, family, socio-economic, educational, religious group status become used for implying other people with other identity in corresponding ways are somehow less favored by God than we are. One could look at Rabbi Jesus as a reformer who was trying to say that God belongs to everyone and is accessible to everyone in immanent ways which occurs within each person. Everyone has image of God identity; every other identity is secondary.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2024
The impulse to be completely private and secret is a loneliness which is assuaged by the "limited" sharing within secret clubs, secret societies, or discreet friendships. Such secret groups have exclusive rules stated or implicit. When one tries to impose such "secret society insider rules" upon the entire human populace, then the greater part of humanity in the practice of the exclusive is "excommunicated" from God's favor. Jesus did not believe that the message of God's love should be segregated within secret club practice.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2024
How to live in equilibrium? To have interior feelings agree with one's speech and body language. Law abiding society is built upon not acting out in speech and deeds everything that one feels. Sublimating feeling energy into alternate speech and body deeds may be a part of spiritual practice. Perhaps meditative poses and mantras.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2024
In publicity religion, we say look at me doing religious things, while at the same time people are hungry, homeless, and generally neglected in the basic life necessities.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2024
Each day we act from the reservoir and repertoire of the possible language products which heretofore comprise our existence. Repetition is new, and what we call inventively new is to reconfigure language products of speech, writing, and body language deeds in new order and arrangement. The inventively new can arise from the traces of what has been and become another trace for a different future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2024
The central feature of faith is persuasion and persuasion is language based in how our speech, writing, and body language is constituted toward living goals. The Bible are words of intervention in our lives of language to persuade toward superlative values.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2024
People live and act by their versions of life situations and people and those versions are learned. Since they are learned, they can be unlearned and new versions can come to the fore. We should be in the process of learning to refine our versions of life and people toward what love and justice means in application.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2024
Each of us each day has to deal with and learn to accept how the great plenitude of everything that has happen has been funneled into the particular influences upon the specifics of our lives. We can presume to know too much about how we have been determined, and diminish and excuse our current volitional agency for new action. Certainly myth and poetry can be an appropriate way to deal with what we do not and cannot know but we should not be theoretical about harm and injustice which are evident and present at hand. Theoretical fatalism about harm and injustice cannot be an excuse for delaying actions to end both.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2024
Because we see and mediate our world through language, we cannot help but see the world through the order which language imposes upon the world even by naming what is disorder. In science, we use language to cite predicable, probable, patterns of order in the world. When we try to understand order in human behaviors, we find less consistent patterns. From trial and error practices within human behaviors, we have come to posit laws for recommended behaviors for various contexts. The great laws of love and justice have to be continually applied in new contexts and such applications are not like the consistency of boiling water in different location; they require the continual wisdom of re-application in situations when more knowledge of the participants is continually being revealed and unfolded. How do we apply love and justice when situations have come to reveal more diverse identities within participants who are welcomed as have equal place within the community.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2024
Modern anachronistic interpretation of biblical writings occur when there is the assumption that biblical writers were writing in the genre of modern eye-witness journalistic reporting and scientific philosophical language which states, a statement is meaningfully true if and only it can be empirical verified. Trying to import these genres as the writing genres of biblical writer has lead to diminution of the equally important truth status of the languages of faith, love, community identity, and praise discourse for the truth of one's highest values.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2024
If John's Gospel were written only be taken literally then Christians would be literal cannibals eating flesh and drinking blood. Would that Christian readers would understand that Scripture is spiritual art written for people trying to succeed in the holistic art of living well.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2024
Using the notion that faith is the manifestation of the values that we are persuaded about, I suggest that we make the very language based notion of persuasion as the starting place to analyze the complimentary and competing persuasions within one's own life and between parties of persuasion. We can have different faiths at the same time, like we can be persuaded about an America with division between church and state, and at the same time be a part of a community which is persuaded about religious beliefs. People who want a theocratic state are people who believe that they can be the "perfect" governmental form who exclusively and by law and force require people to conform to their own way of being persuaded about God.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2024
Because we have language, we cannot help but anthropomorphize everything which comes to language. Language is personal, so we project personality upon everything by virtue of using language. So, God as Plenitude does not escape having personality from humans who cannot help but use language. It is unavoidable for humans to conceive and speak in anything other than "personal" terms.
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2024
Consuming is a metaphor for how we have taken on the significant words of our lives. In John's Gospel, Jesus is referred to as the Word, who is God. So, the consuming of Jesus the Word is to take the Christly values deep within oneself and reconstitute one's life. Is taking on word real and substantial? It is as substantial as if one is eating flesh and blood. Flesh and blood are metaphors for the human common sense tendency to indicate that what is seen and touched is somehow "more real" than the invisible words which have come to comprise our understanding of existence.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2024
"those who eat my flesh and drink my blood?" The Johannine channeler of words of Jesus when speaking/writing in the name of Jesus, is challenging crass literalism in language use, even while piggy backing the substantiality metaphor of the physical world to indicate that spiritual and non-literal description of experiences like mysticism and Eucharist are very substantially and meaningfully true in ways that are different than common sense reality.
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2024
Faith is the life habit of being persuaded. Being persuaded pertains to different objects of persuasion in different discursive practices. What one is persuaded about in science and the methods for that persuasion are different than the kinds of persuasions one has in one's spiritual life. The two shouldn't be confused even as a person can have faith in the spiritual sense and in the scientific sense at the same time without contradiction.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2024
Sometimes the impulse of wanting immediate perfection for others in the political realm blinds us from being practical about very incremental steps towards being better than we have been. I want complete perfection (as I see it) or nothing is the recipe for a selfish quietism and can result in greater evil of two imperfect options winning the day.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2024
The writer of John's Gospel aim is indicate that spiritual enlightenment is awakening to a different understanding of language. The crassly literal is mocked by blatantly suggesting cannibal practice: Eat my flesh, drink my blood. The Gospel of John invites us to be poets who are influenced by a mystical experience which happens to people living ordinary common sense life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2024
With a certain amount of randomness but also within predictable parameters of what can come to language for any person at anytime, one participates in the events of language production even while one is also a product of language in how one's speech, writing, and body deeds is pre-constituted before another occasion in the linguistic field.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2024
Heuristics is effort to be creatively inventive in solving problems. Within a tradition of specialized language use like religion, to be inventive in the task of persuasion about the chief values of one's community, one becomes steeped in the inherited traditions and presents an inventive continuity of the new with the old. Invention is a new blend dealing with what has arisen in the experience of a new genius value setter arising. New Testament writers had to deal with the genius of Jesus in continuity with what had gone before.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2024
The borrowing, transference of reference, and repurposing of metaphors occur in the New Testament. Torah was referred to as living bread and in the living bread discourse Jesus is said to be the living bread which comes down from heaven.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2024
One could call biblical writings and all religious discourse as "identity discourse." Such discourse totemic writing for community identity around the shared highest values.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2024
John's Gospel is a writing about Word and language use, challenging the notion that literal use or empirical verification is the only way to access meaningful sublime truths in our lives. Life without artistic, spiritual, and aesthetic truths would essentially be removing heart or aesthetic emotional IQ as valid modes of perception which could not co-exist with meaningful empirical verification.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2024 (Feast of the Transfiguration)
The event of the Transfiguration presents Jesus as light. As the earth turns we are deprived of its light at night, only to have it return in the morning. Light is symbolic of spiritual enlightenment, which is progressive. Each day we need new light and new light helps us see new things in different way. We need to work at uncovering and removing the obstacles which keep us from seeing new things in new ways in the necessary creative advance to which we are called.
Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2024
Part of appropriating the biblical writings is knowing how the external means the interior, as in "coming down from heaven" means arising from the inner abode to become manifest in the world.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2024
Bread symbolizes the need for food for human life. What proceeds bread? Word or language which is the very medium for thinking and doing or even knowing that one needs bread. Before we live by bread, we live by Word, the profound reservoir of connectedness in which we live, move, and have our being/becoming.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2024
The ancient saying, "humanity does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God," is expressed the bread of heaven discourse in a figurative way. In John's God, Christ is the Eternal Word of God, proceeding from God. Word is the prior condition for being people who have come to make bread for our physical existence but the spiritual Word condition is inseparably present in eating bread, including Eucharistic bread.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2024
St. Paul as a prisoner did not envision a Christian Roman nationalism; his mysticism was more cosmic. He proposed for everyone to grow into becoming the body of Christ, or living with each other as those who were made in the image of God respecting that image within each other with behaviors of kindness and care.
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2024
The "bread of heaven" discourse in John came to writing around the same time as the Juvenal writing, "give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt."
