Aphorism of the Day, October 2024

Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2024 (Begins All Hallowtide)

To really miss someone after they have passed away.  What is the feeling of "missing someone?"  Is it veneration?  The feeling of deeply missing Jesus after he died surely was the crucible for his post resurrection appearances.  All Hallowtide is like Easter in the fall when we deal with the poignant feelings of missing people whom we have lost to death, both the well known great ones and the local saints in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2024

Living lives having language means that our lives are an always already moving vocation of value assignment.  Words assigns values and the goal of life is be at the work of upgrading our work of value assigning toward what informs the ideal values.  Jesus came to reveal the supreme values and they are succinctly stated as loving God and our neighbors.

Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2024

Why do laws changes?  Rules continually need to be reapplied in situation with analysis of whether they fulfill the second great commandment, loving ones neighbor as oneself.  Why should former practices of  slavery, subjugation of women, child labor, and the status of LGBTQ+ change?  When the regularized treatment of any person fails the "love your neighbor as yourself" test, the law and regularized practice must be change to comply with the greater principle.

Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2024

While the Hebrew Scripture can seem to be mostly writings for and on behalf the people of Israel in the many traditions which derive from the same, there are ample teachings therein which qualify as categorical imperatives to be relevant to the lives of everyone, everywhere.

Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2024

The words which we use are abbreviations which stand in place the realities which we experience.  They are abbreviations because they are reductions which highlights the existence of particular things in contrast to all the others things which they are not.

Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2024

We might think of today as simply the repetition of things which have occurred before since the Preacher Qoheleth wrote that "there is nothing new under the sun" as supporting the theory of vanity of vanities all is vanity."  The before and after phenomenon of events means that the after is always newer than the before even if the after includes continuity traces of the before.  Apparent newness only becomes evident in time-lapsing assessment of the past when change is revealed from the unnoticed incrementalism of actual experience of time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2024

It has become evident that the situation of complexity due to the massive proliferation of world knowledge makes the owners of information brokers best capable to manipulate resources of life and if information greedy conglomerates do not care for the common good of the most possible number of individuals, individuals will be but small cogs serving the big owners of information who have the handling capacity.  Religion and politics, and their governing bodies,  should be about using power for the common good.  It is not certain that either will be able to function that way into the future.

Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2024

We like stories because they are time-lapsed and things falsely happen quickly, in contrast to the patience which is required in the present when "watching grass grow" does not seem so exciting.

Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2024

In the present, our past lives become but reductive time-lapsed memorial stories, and we continually edit such time-lapsed stories when we chose a memorial photo of a good time or a bad time.  We can change the time-lapsing perspective with editorial choices in the present.

Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2024

The traces of our memory are always "time lapsed" because we cannot relive actual yesterday time in today's time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2024

It has to be said repeatedly, that the Bible is to be understood literarily as artistic literature, not literally as scientific verification or eye-witness journalism.  The paucity of written works during ancient times meant that the Bible had to be politics, poetry, myth of origin, instruction, and entertainment, in a very omni-competent way.   Today, our genres are split into many distinct discourses each with their own discursive practices.  While the ancients did not have modern science, they still had common sense and naive realism to distinguish between what can happen in nature and what can't.  When interpreters insist that every human event story in the Bible necessarily conforms to empirical verification, they are offending the biblical writers as those who did not know the difference between common sense and aesthetic presentation of their stories for community identity.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2024

In the petition of the Serenity Prayer, we ask for courage to be the answers to our own prayers when with wisdom we discern our actual ability to do so.  Sometimes religious humanity is waiting to God to act while God is waiting for humanity to do the justice which is in our power to do.

Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2024

AI text is Frankenstein text, stolen words from actual people stitched together with intricate probability propriety for a textual event pretending to hide actual personal presence in its product.

Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2024

Common sense and science are the ways that we live with the future as the continuing field of probabilities.  Actuarial wisdom is based upon observed past experience and living in learned predictive ways with what might happen.  We continually assess in the present the success of our former predicative ways and add the present experience to the new data base for future predicative living.  Americans fail at common sense and actuarial wisdom by politically accepting that the proliferation of the numbers of guns in our society is the legal reality of the second amendment while tolerating the death and harm due to the accessibility of so many guns.

Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2024

What's the difference between political faith and religious faith?  Political faith has to do with living according to a persuasive system that keeps members of religious communities from hurting each other because of the "final absoluteness" with which they hold their positions.  If one admits that modern life includes people living in close proximity in ideological groups that are quite different and conflicting systems of persuasion, then the legal teeth of a common political persuasion needs to be such as to prevent members with conflicting "absolute systems" from harming each other at worst, and at best promoting a live and let live freedom which protects common good outcomes.  America has to continuously hold to the ideals of this common system of political persuasion from being replaced by sectarian religious communal practice.

Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2024

What might be the difference between a macroscopic prayer and a microscopic prayer?  God bless the entire world.  God bring well-being to this specific person or situation.  The more microscopic prayers for specifics engage the caring faculties of the petitioner in a way that might provide a caring orientation toward the person or situation such that one is more apt to fulfill the aspect of the Serenity prayer of having the "courage to change things that one is able to change."

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.