Aphorism of the Day, October 2024

Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2024

Whirlwind, tempest, storm are attending metaphors for God in Hebrew Scriptures.  This bespeaks of the human inability to know the future as actual in face of omni-probabilities which confront human at anytime.  How do we discern communication from God arising from the whirlwind of omni-probabilities of what may happen?

Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2024

Life is often about how to discern the significant difference between the potential and the actual.  To make the potential equal to the actual is not just "counting chickens" before they hatch, it is to elevate a false future and neglect the obvious now.

Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2024

In biblical typology, Adam represents humanity entering moral agency and with the multiplication of bad practices we created a humanly determined tendency toward soiling innocency with a plethora of bad choices creating an environment with a tipping probability for people to be more bad than good.  Jesus arrived in no perfect and innocent environment of pre-moral agency infancy but within the collection of events which seem to determine humanity toward probable bad outcomes.  In this morass, in contrast to Adam as typical moral agent, Jesus exemplified Unique Sonship of the divine making the right choices within the morass of human probabilities.

Aphorism of the Day, October 12, 2024

Another way to understand the condition of sin is to be alienated in awareness of the inheritance of creation, namely, of being made in God's image as a child of God.

Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2024

Some people treat the words of the Bible as though they were causatively absolute for why thing have occurred when the words are actually those which arose in ancient cultures as wisdom insights in a wide array of discursive practices regarding the discovery of God as the highest value.  They also are collections of words which had long community approval processes for including them in the various canons of being the "official" and authoritative text books in various faith communities.

Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2024

Books like the Bible are textual traces of peoples of ancient cultures.  We use these texts to imaginatively reconstruct these cultures, which sustained practices like slavery and the subjugation of women and in embracing their "authority" in our time we have to refrain from absolutizing ancient cultural practices which do not represent the very best of love and justice.  Accepting the reality that interpretations of the past change significantly through time is crucial for creative advance in the pursuit of more perfect love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2024

When a discourse of spiritual aesthetics as is found in the Bible is treated as scientific discourse of the empirically verifiable, the interpretive practice results in what is called "fundamentalism."  This is both a insult to science and spirituality, by assuming that the only truths in life have to be empirically verifiable as well as denying that science and  spiritual discourse cannot co-exist in mutually reciprocal ways.  What unifies all discourses is the always already mystery of there being MORE.

Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2024

Religion, science, art, poetry, jurisprudence, politics, are all strategies of living with the mystery of probabilities, i.e., of what may happen.  Each has a discursive lane in this epic effort, and people need to learn how to stay in the discursive lane appropriate to the strategy.

Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2024

Rather than using the law as a personal check list for what we think that we've achieved in good living, we should be future thinking in asking ourselves what is the next best thing that I need to do to surpass myself in a future state.  What we yet need to do should make us humble about what we think that we've already done.

Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2024

The irony of the American democratic system was to have a government which prevented different Christians from persecuting and killing each other for religious reasons.  Non-Christian government enforced a minimum of charity among Christians by saying "You can't hurt each other.  You can't burn your religious opponents at the stake.  And you can no longer dunk women in water because you call them heretical witches."  Once any religious confessional system is elevated to have government authority charity in practice is lost for those who do not conform.

Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2024

Total probability is beyond individual events and agents of good and bad.  It is permissive of both in their lesser freedom while being necessarily weak in not taking sides in what may happen.  The weakness of such great Freedom is what accounts for genuine moral validity absent any coercive determinism.

Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2024

I think that the child motif is a prominent one in the Gospels because empathy with a vulnerable infant or child is needed to act in the Christly way of taking care of the vulnerable.  This is a chief Gospel value.

Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2024

Science is a method of statistical approximation to analyze and manipulate the physical world with the discovery of consistent patterns which aid prediction accuracy of future events.  In the human behavior sphere, laws have arisen in human community to provide best practices for the promulgation of the supreme values of a community trying to live together well.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2024

The Bible includes narrative which is like time lapsed photography.  It collapses years, months, and moments into the narrative event presenting the illusion that things actually happened faster than they do.  This can lead people to think that salvatory event do not happen quick enough for them in their lives.  Our lives are not time lapsed until the aftermath of telling our story from the isolated events of emergence of obvious signs of change.

Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2024

The wisdom story of Job involves the Omni-Probable God of all interacting with lesser probable forces manifested in what happens to people.  The wise writer is writing a polemic against a simplistic notion that if you are good, then you have the perpetual attending proof of God's blessing of good luck and fortune and the theory that if bad things happen to you, it is proof that you are necessarily bad or worse than others.  In the free play of probabilities, very bad things can happen to good people.  Is it right to reject God when bad happenings happen to good people, and more poignant, to innocent people?  Does one blame God for the seeming injustice and thus find no reason for loyalty to God?  Or does one remain loyal to God precisely because of the weakness of God in refusing to interfere with the genuine freedom of what may happen to anyone?  The freedom of the choice of sentient human beings and the seeming random freedom of non-sentient beings validates the worth of moral decision, which is more important than shallowly thinking that God is just for rubber stamping my life's good fortune.  If God is a badge I wear to prove that I am favored and blessed by good luck, then such a view deserves to be crushed when "bad luck" hits me.