Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2024
Atheists are those who wish that billions of people hadn't confessed and shouldn't confess within certain communities with language traditions of the Sublime, the uncanny human experience with the name of God being designated for such a superlative experience. ALL exists for everyone; an atheist is one who does not want to project certain human superlatives of theisms upon ALL.
Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2024
A story theme of the Bible is that special people had to have special birth events. This satisfies the predestination to greatness trope.
Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2024
People usually decry the "utopian" because of its impossibility of happening due to the violation of natural laws. The presentation of an uncanny future transformation of things is but an exaggeration to highlight the lure of the direction of perfection.
Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2024
Thinking about the future is always "utopian," in being no such time, or place, with no such conditions. But we always live toward such myth.
Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2024
In our lives we live by the "illusion" of the utopian, i.e., no such perfect place with no such perfect people. Hope is the perpetual creation of what is not yet and will not ever be within our worded lives. When the actual comes to pass, and happens it has used hope's utopian illusion as a target. The religious violation of hope is to pretend that hope's utopian illusions will be or have been actual in telling what has happened. At the same time, imagination about the past, present, and future is valid human endeavor for inventiveness of all sorts, even if but for entertainment purposes in a life which needs can always use uncanny motivations.
Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2024
One can understand the conditions of living within genuine freedom of what can probably happen as the life of being in a perpetual ordeal. Even being in states of apparent ease and comfort are challenges to our freedom, because in such states of well-being we have the challenge to help alleviate the suffering of those not in ease. To be baptized with fire is to live in the conditions of the ordeal. Accepting that about life helps one be honest that we always already live in the age of the suffering servant Messiah. Get used to it.
Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2024
The Apocalyptic is the generalization of one pondering one's own eventual death upon everyone else in hope that a higher power will give new beginnings which ameliorate suffering and pain and injustice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2024
It is easy to call biblical religions the future of illusion since so much of the writings are "utopian," i.e., no such place and no such angelic persons inhabiting them. We cannot deny the function of the utopian though for establishing the direction of our moral aspirations. To call America a "light on the hill," is also such utopian language impelling us to be our better angels. Our world cannot escape the human propensity of the "illusion of utopian vision" because no one escapes a vision of how one might be better. The shadow of this hope is that many think that they can be better through greed, lying, and oppressing others.
Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2024
The New Testament was written by people who found a way to rejoice when they did not always have the ideal conditions to do so. They learned to rejoice when they had no social or political power. Today many believe that rejoicing should happen because we have political power and conditions of ease when we should be working to enable the dispossessed to have reasons to rejoice.
Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2024
One needs to be honest that the notion of messianism was diverse and developing in the New Testament and the communities which generated the writings. The presentations of the Messiah reflected the needs and situations of the communities which were writing and preaching about Jesus, all of which happened into the second century when in fact the world had not yet ended with an apocalyptic event.
Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2024
The "under the radar" of the Roman Empire success of the Jesus Movement resulted in the defining of the current reality of the Messiah being a Risen Christ figure presiding as king of an interior kingdom discovered by those who were "baptized" by the Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2024
The writing of history is more about the time when the writing is done than about the period studied in the writing. Why? In writing history, we ask and frame the question according to our current interest about what we think is important about the past because we already know what has happened between now and then. So the Gospels written decades after Jesus are mainly about the conditions of the the writers in those decades than they are about the conditions which Jesus actually faced in his situation. Everything about the presentation of Jesus is edited and redacted according to the needs of the writers and the writers' readers/listeners. Writers do not write into a past vacuum; they write to a living audience.
Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2024
When describing the significance of the lives of Jesus and John the Baptist, the writers of the Gospels, particularly the synoptics were obliged for matters of rhetorical authority to use phrases from the Hebrew Scriptures, meaning that their lives had precedence in message and intent within the Judaic tradition.
Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2024
The person who forgets that he or she is using language, uses language while doing such forgetting.
Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2024
Santa Claus is the end result of a most radically altered saint in history. How did this fourth century bishop morph into the totally secular children's saint to be Santa Claus from the North Pole using a sleigh with reindeer to deliver Christmas Eve gifts to children? We can go bah humbug on this seeming commercial exploitation of children, or we can accept that the Christ Child and Nicholas of Myra roll through history with manifold collateral effects, including helping some businesses stay in the black because of excessive end of the year spending.
Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2024
John the Baptist was a perpetual faster while Jesus was accused of being a drunkard, a glutton, and one who ate with sinners. The fasting of Jesus might be describe as being in the world but not "of" the world, or his perfection in being moderate in all manner of impulse control. John the Baptist with his extreme asceticism and wilderness isolation might be said to be "not in the world," and not "of" the world.
Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2024
Long before intermittent fasting became a dieting trend, such fasting has been a part of a spiritual rule of life for holistic living. John the Baptist with his ascetic lifestyle is perhaps a chief model for the "fasting" lifestyle.
Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2024
Latest or end times are attempts to put a book end upon Continuity. It can't be actually done but we need telling beginnings and endings to tell the stories which give us identity in our contexts from which we project our stories upon Continuity.
Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2024
The Gospels piggyback John the Baptist and Jesus. Their story is told together and one can only assume motives and purposes for coupled presentation. It must be that the two movements, of John and Jesus were inextricably linked.
Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2024
What does the "end of the world" mean? That there will no longer be human beings alive to experience a continuing material world? Or that both human experience of the material world and the material world will be gone? Does it mean time ends? Will there no longer be a process in the material world that has continuous before and after occasions? It might be a better appropriation of "apocalyptic" and "eschaton" by switching the notion of "end" to mean merely the latest. In the latest occasion, there is always already continuous beginnings and ending occurring with every degree of human experience on the continuum of weal and woe. In language we try to "stop" time by positing an ever "latest" occasion as if we could convert diachronicity into synchronisticity. The illusion is to think that structuralism can defeat processual time by "stopping" things from development when the use of language is treated as a "pause" button on time, presuming a "freeze-frame" effect.
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