In the field of probability where there is an infinite play among infinite particular agents with degrees of freedom, the supreme good is actually freedom. In what actually happens the task of faith is to assert goodness as the preferred norm, which persists as such even when what is bad seems to be winning the situation of human experience.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2024
When events and people are gone from one's life, memories remain as a powerful engine of engagement with the present. Memories have trained our intellectual muscles to respond in ways that we did in the past even though the context has changed.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2024
The past is dead but lives now in traces in memories some of which are retained by all of the memory technologies, e.g. text, video, et. al. We interacted with the traces that are accessible to us and we cannot help but add ourselves to them in manifold ways which in turn add to the traces given to the future.
Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2024
What good is there in conserving great things of the past, if the greatness does not have within it the dynamic adaptability to be interpretatively pragmatic in applied justice and love to new situations in the future? Why would we want the great biblical principles of love and justice which were generated in cultural conditions of slavery and subjugation of women to retain those cultural conditions in our time? Great principles in time have the eventual ability to expose the hidden hypocrisies of human cultural practices.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2024
The constant awareness of the horrific should not lead for us to equate our discomfort with knowing about such horrific events with the people who are innocently in harm's way of such events. We cannot claim vicarious fatigue on behalf of those on the front line of assaults.
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2024
The Psalmist asked for a clean heart and renewed spirit. Much of the healing of Jesus had to do with the health or making "clean" the interior lives of people. Too many people like the Hollywood dramatic notions of "casting out demons," when in fact the goal of life is to learn how to have a healthy interior life. Yes, dramatic events do occur from within people on the way to health. People like instant magical cures as opposed to the life long process of learning to live with psychological health. By having "break through" events of health doesn't exempt us from the continuing process of living in healthy ways.
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2024
Perfectionism breeds procrastination which is the delay for the impossibility of the perfect and final answer or response to the way things are. Life is more like tap dancing in a minefield and keeping vigilant to step in the better place as opposed to the worse place, with continual glances toward the destinations of perceived better moments. Accepting the vocation as such a tap dancer is important to also appreciate the beauty of the dance with the knowledge that the overall setting is more glorious than the dangerous mines.
Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2024
"Whoever is not against us is for us." This saying is a reminder not to get caught up in "ministerial exclusivism and paranoia" about competition among people trying to do good but with quite different strategies and perspectives.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2024
Using AI, artificial intelligence, to write would be a misnomer. It it might better be called an "editorial interactive reading with a generator of targeted probable words for specific contexts." The future of AI "writing" will kill the author. Will the AI user have to list HAL as the co-author?
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2024
Faith as persuasion might be the key diagnostic construct to reveal the motivation of anyone about anything. The New Testament Greek word for faith meant persuasion in Aristotle.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2024
If language is a personal medium is everything personal? Why designate somethings as impersonal? Is the divine the result of a projection of personality upon all Probability of Occurrences? Is the task of science to demythologize personality of total probability by saying that one cannot impute greater Personal motives for why certain specific things happen to people? Can one designate the great Personality of the universe as Creative Freedom where the impersonal is an designation of honestly admitting that we can't precisely cite a telling motive behind what is always already happening? Personality is a human story of being compelled to find meaning in the micro-situations of our lives because personhood is the attempt to find identity in relationships.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2024
We do not know what would have been new until it is already old, when we look back and say, "That was new." But isn't past tense new an oxymoron?
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2824
When an infinite number of events are causally connected with each other, it is rather arrogant to presume to know too much about causality. This does not absolve us from responsibility for preventing seeable impact causal events of harm. Further, doing good creates burgeoning effects among all other events so we have the responsibility to fill our areas of influence with goodness so as to create an osmosis of good collateral effects.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2024
New Testament mystagogy may be about being able to access what is always already presence because of the divine image on one's life. How does one "re-access" what harsh environments have taught us to lose? Follow the "new birth" and child motifs of the words of Jesus. Recovery is "new" birth.
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2024
One should not miss the child motif in the words of Jesus. He noted that the disciples could be childish adults in their selfish desire to be "first." He highlighted that they should be "child like" in having motives that had not been corrupted by becoming childish adults with controlling needs.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2024
If we are being honest, we must admit that we still live in the age the suffering servant Messiah. There is no heaven on earth, no Utopia, but one endlessly delayed in hope because we believe it is better to be inspired by hopeful good rather than fateful evil.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2024 (Holy Cross Day)
The cross is perhaps the most re-valued object in human history. How does a cruel instrument of capital punishment become rendered in gold and silver cross necklaces even worn by one's baby? In the mystagogy of Paul, identity with the mode of the death of Jesus became the spiritual power to die to what is unworthy in one's life. The cross has become a spiritual talisman.
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2024
What is the rhetorical purpose of talking about things which have not and cannot ever be humanly experienced and related to people who are currently living? Created out of nothing? Who has ever experienced "nothingness?" Yet nothing is a word for what has not been experienced. What is the rhetorical purpose of using words like the "end of time?" How does one posit an end of there being language users to speak about to those who are alive and using language? Is it coping language to survive what can seem to be so wrong with the way things are now. The philosopher whom some thought was going mad, Nietzsche one wrote in an aphorism, "The thought of suicide gets me through many a night." Is rhetorical non-being merely a way to cope with harshness of what life may be for any number of people at any time?
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2024
The notion of messiah is not a finished notion because it continues within time of people who continue to interpret its significance. The apocalyptic genre in the Bible and non-biblical writings bring to bear a continuous future which continuously delays any notion of final fulfillment. Nothing is final as long as there is Time, and since Time is final, becoming is what is primary. Such becoming means continuous openness to what will yet become. Jesus manifest the human messianic in specific ways and fuller messianic is deferred to what the Risen Christ continues to do through those who embrace the Christly presence, with Christly ideals, with Christly behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2024
The notion of messiah arises from a variety of language traditions about anointed and telling leaders of God who happen in history. The New Testament traditions settle upon Jesus as a unique son (child) of God figure whose life instantiates "messianic" values or the values which promote the two greatest values which are stated in the summary of the law: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself. From the many written traditions of messiah and The Messiah, one finds quite a quilt work of agreement, contrasts, and even seeming contradictions. Just as time is not finished, speaking is not finished, Scripture (inspired writing) is not finished, the messiah tradition is not finished yet. The futurism implied in biblical apocalyptic is an indication that the messianic is an ever open tradition with the dream of a final justice which is to be the inspiration for its instantiation in events of justice now. Messiah as Justice is always beckoning with the bending lure of it arc; we need to always be pushing the arc of justice in the right direction.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2024
In the process of the development of Christian tradition one can note that later advanced notions of the Messiah are inserted into the narrative presentations of Jesus in the Gospels in dialogue with other notions of Messiah.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2024
The Gospels, in part, are constructed around a topic of early disagreement within parties of Judaism regarding the identity of Messiah.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2024
Since the natural sciences have become the standard of truth, to honor that standard of truth, many have felt it necessary to present all things human within the standard of something being true only if it could be empirically verified. Hence aesthetic truths have become the tolerated neglected step-sisters of science, even while in popular culture non-scientific truths of religion, spirituality, myth, art, cinema, and music have flourished in their "non-truthful" ways of just being popularly relevant.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2024
The Gospels are writing art reconstructing narratives about Jesus with the knowledge of what had happened in the Gentile Jesus Movement. Such writing cannot avoid being anachronistic because of the quest for the origins of what has become the community practice, namely, the inclusion of Gentiles who do not have to conformed to the ritual purity of Judaism.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2024
We live our lives caught within Language. Everything inside and outside has linguistic coding as we live on a treadmill of endless taxonomy of more meaning being produced about the previous meanings which we have inherited as we interpret with what we have inherited in our language what we think is happening to us now.
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2024
Much of the New Testament came to text when there was not a complete formal separation between synagogue and members of the Jesus Movement so the writing reflect intra-religious disagreements. Family arguments are sometimes the most severe because the ones closest can hurt one the most because of shared past. Perhaps the greatest disagreement was the insight that the Jesus Movement had to be a Christo-centric Judaism which was made accessible to Gentile inhabitants of the Roman Empire through the dispensing with the ritual purity requirements which characterized the need to retain a distinction from Gentiles.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2024
The framers of the American Constitution should get credit for enforcing charity among Christians. After all an American citizen can't be excommunicated or burnt at the stake for believing something different than the majority.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2024
Sayings of Jesus are presented as hard sayings even using mockingly the prejudices which existed between ethnic groups. As in, "it's not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." The rhetorical wisdom purpose of such a seemingly cruel statement was to goad faith in belief of being persuaded about health as something which is beyond trivial issues of one's tribal preferences.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2024
Does a "rhetorical device" mean the conscious use of a language strategy to accomplish a specific rhetorical purpose? Do rhetorical devices occur in regular language use in unconscious ways as being the common habit of one's culture? Are New Testament writings successions of rhetorical devices with a persuasive goal?
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2024
The unavoidable human task is to make everything into a language product. Such continuous effort makes it seems as though we "control" things we cannot control and we define control by manipulation by and through creation of language products.
