No wild parties on Christian New Years Eve. Just make sure the Advent Wreath and Candles are ready for tomorrow. One does have so many calendars to observe.
Aphorism of the Day, November 29, 2024
Retailers want to go from red to black on Black Friday. They rely upon an update to the Cartesian phrase: "I have therefore, I am."
Aphorism of the Day, November 28, 2024
Generous people don't see themselves as poor. Their reality is enough, and it is enough always to have something to share.
Aphorism of the Day, November 27, 2024
Being thankful is the prelude to work to help other people be thankful as well.
Aphorism of the Day, November 26, 2024
Jesus in his time as he is known by speakers of Aramaic is perhaps unknowable. Traces of his life going through representations by some of his associates were eventually presented in the koine Greek decades after he lived, so there are presentations of the life of Jesus catering to reading/listening persons living decades after Jesus who lived far away from the Galilee home of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, November 25, 2024
The biggest mistake of Bible readers is importing "our age thinking about what is true" back onto the biblical writers' notion of what was significantly meaningful for them and their community formation genres of explicating their most meaningful values.
Aphorism of the Day, November 24, 2024
When the notion of "king" has lost it meaningful relevance in modern life how does one view it as a model analogy for Christ as King? Instead of coercive figures we prefer persuasive figures who inform us about what is best about human behaviors and how we can surpass ourselves in excellence in future states. Christ as the omni-competent human ideal serves as the directional guide for us.
Aphorism of the Day, November 23, 2024
If faith is understood to be persuasion, then everyone has many objects of faith about which they are persuaded to motivate the values and actions of their lives.
Aphorism of the Day, November 22, 2024
If we want to be political about Christ the King today, let us politically care for the vulnerable and the needy and bring about justice in our society. Let us not be tricked to be false Christian rubber stamps for manipulative greedy and powerful people who love to use Christian votes for very non-Christ-like outcomes.
Aphorism of the Day, November 21, 2024
While people have left biblical faiths because the loudest adherents of confessional faiths hold that everything within the Bible that is described as happening is regarded to have modern journalistic standards of reporting accuracy and could have been empirical verified by multiple observers. People who have left have not left the fantasy aspect of their personalities; they let that artistic imagination feature gain projection in art and cinema as valid entertainment which replaces biblical mythical material regarded to be historical exact happenings.
Aphorism of the Day, November 20, 2024
The notion of Christ as King needs to be run through an interpretation re-appropriation language mill to keep it from being relegated to something like an imaginary Disney Kingdom figure. Freud's designation of religion as illusion resulted because Christian with their ideas pretended we were still driving horse driven chariots in the age of automobiles. The ancient principle of an idea can be retained even if given an new appearance. What a kingly omni-competent person means can be given an update.
Aphorism of the Day, November 19, 2024
It would seem that most Christians prefer to be on the side of the power of society rather than be in the situations which generated the New Testament, i.e., being a minority group trying to flying under the radar of the Emperor and his surrogates. Many Christians also want the government to enforce their particular interpretation of what they believe are final ethical values for everyone. To make one's brand of Christian practice coercive is to violate the lure of the love of God in choosing to do what is right.
Aphorism of the Day, November 18, 2024
Once biblical interpreters asserted that the Bible is holy exact history with no "entertainment" function for people, the fantastic themes of Messiah and Apocalyptic began to appear "outside" of religion in popular culture. Today the messiahs are part of the super hero pantheon, and sci-fi and action adventure are the apocalyptic on steroids. Cinema makers have said to religionists, "literal messiah and apocalyptic are too fantastic to be believed, but their entertainment value is truly believable."
Aphorism of the Day, November 17, 2024
Birth pangs might be a metaphor for living with the live of change. The pain of now is going to result in the future being born and the birth results will render the value our pangs.
Aphorism of the Day, November 16, 2024
Understanding faith as that about which we are persuaded about such that it governs our decisions, actions, and ideologies, is a uniting of the the New Testament word "pistos" for faith with the word "pistos" in Aristotle's Greek. Whether in Aristotle's rhetoric or in Christian faith, persuasion is the key feature of both.
Aphorism of the Day, November 15, 2024
In postmodernism, there is skepticism about grand unifying themes of religion or philosophy. One can appreciate that no human system could comprehend such vastness and attempts to pragmatically implement "unity" end up being more coercive than persuasive. What I propose is that "totality" is an unavoidable feature of language, in the sense that using one word assumes the entire linguistic universe, even while admitting that one could never exhaustively know the entire linguistic universe. To be a language user is to be a witness to the totality of Language.
Aphorism of the Day, November 14, 2024
Harsh reality can force the transformation of the physical actual into figures of language as memorial traces with an implied but not exact corresponding meaning. The Temple became in Paul, the body of each Christian after the building was destroyed. Losing the accessible actual body of Jesus, the body of Christ became the group of people called the church. Things and people of the past which are not empirically available often become traces which return to the poetic rememberers.
Aphorism of the Day, November 13, 2024
Apocalyptic is a genre generated when any group of people feel anxious about it all ending in the way things are for us. Such may be coping visualization for hard times. Real threats sometimes makes us think selfishly, as in, "If disaster is happening to me, it also should be happening for the entire cosmos." Apocalyptic genre reveals that a person and one's group reside at the center of their own perceptual universe.
Aphorism of the Day, November 12, 2024
The songs of the mothers Hannah and Mary are celebratory songs about the marvelous and miraculous births of sons. They also include statements about the mighty and powerful being cast down, which in death happens to everyone but the oppressors by definition remain because when one is cast down another takes the short vacancy.
Aphorism of the Day, November 11, 2024
The Scriptures provided the model for the hero and catastrophic future genres. Modern culture with the super hero genre have moved the messianic out of religion into general culture. Science fiction and apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres have moved the biblical apocalyptic into general culture unmoored from the Bible. One might say that these genre function mythically for our modern cultures today in similar ways that they did for the biblical people who generated texts of messianism and the apocalyptic. Whether professing religion or not people are motivated by deep psychical energy which comes to stories within religion or in cultures which purport to having removed religion from their reasonable vocabulary.
Aphorism of the Day, November 10, 2024
When society's jesters prevail proclaiming humor and satire regarding human foibles, it can be covering a despairing misanthropism that can discourage corrective actions for the golden idol of a comic, a laughing audience. Society can go to hell as long as there is a laughing audience. A comic is happier to have a buffoon as perpetual subject matter than to have a functioning society. Boring people who make the trains run on time are no fun for the comic.
Aphorism of the Day, November 9, 2024
Institutions develop in part when family and tribe structures no longer manifest the voluntary adequate care of the members of family or tribe. Institutional failure to adequately care for all members of society is due mainly to people with wealth and power not giving adequate support for the institutions to care for those in need.
Aphorism of the Day, November 8, 2024
When the hope that was built around certain people and paths built within oneself a story fortress is shattered, the immediate task is to envision new paths of equal goodness which changes the people and the mission than what had been anticipated.
Aphorism of the Day, November 7, 2024
The history of evil becoming banal starts with everyone is doing it.
Aphorism of the Day, November 6, 2024
Irony: the deep collective grief of millions happens alongside the collective winning joys of millions. Time will tell how the vulnerable will be sustained.
Aphorism of the Day, November 5, 2024 (Election Day in the USA)
In the USA, by law no form of religion can be the "established" religion of the government but we are always voting for the hard and tough love of justice which means we should be voting for the leaders who promote the freedom for the co-existence of people of all persuasions to be part of a pragmatic system for the common goals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Aphorism of the Day, November 4, 2024
What does it say when the poor widow gives her last too coins to the Temple treasury? It is a judgment on religious institutions who live off the giving of the very people who need to be helped. It is a judgment on the greedy rich whose lack of generosity is exposed by the generous poor.
Aphorism of the Day, November 3, 2023
A chief task in life is not to misrepresent the way things are to oneself. Not lying to oneself about the living in the universe of all that has happened and about what probably will happen is important. Part of our lying is forgivable because we wear cultural and contextual lenses which only allow us to see things in certain ways, even untrue ways. With internal language we need to continually cleanse the internal language lenses through which we read and interpret our world.
Aphorism of the Day, November 2, 2024 (All Souls' Day)
Christian missionaries often criticized other cultures for being involved in "ancestor worship." The grief of lost loved ones is accompanied with a "deep missing" of the loved one; is not this feeling of missing, not a respectful veneration for that person? The liturgies of All Hallowtide deal with the veneration of deeply missing people and we regard such veneration as being evidence of the continuing community that we share with those whom we no longer see.
Aphorism of the Day, November 1, 2024. (All Saints' Day)
All Saints Day is a particular observance of Easter, months after Easter in the Easter effect of the continuity of life for people in their afterlives. After the death of Jesus, he was known to have continuity with the life he lived before death, after he died, and this witness of the continuity of Jesus into the Risen Christ became the assurance to validate the faith that great heroes of faith (whose popularity is widely spread) and the local saints of our own lives have continuity in their afterlives.
No comments:
Post a Comment