Aphorism of the Day, February 2025

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2025

It is our habit to confess "spirit" or "soul" as the mysterious essences of a person which the surgeons can never really locate when they cut us open.  The most truly knowable mystery about our inner selves is language or word ability.  Language mysteriously happens within us with obvious communicative results and even when surgeons cite language centers in the brain, the mystery of it is still not solved.  How we are constituted by our language is perhaps a better designation of our "essence" than the word spirit, which is derived from wind or breath.

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2025

It is hard to conceive of a world without time, even a world which does not rely upon a sensorial experience of time.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2025

The mantic or divination of images of the end need to be looked at not as future prediction but as how the dreamers' interior lives give them images of execution of justice for coping with their difficult times.  Too many literal apocalyptic people use the mantic visions to presume that God is on our side and is going to knock the heads of our opponents, as we see and understand our opponents.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2025

The camel driver warned not to believe the label on the package, "Pitted Dates." Bite very carefully he warned.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2025

For Paul, the resurrection is being "hooked on a feeling" that an inner self will not dissolve as energy to be dispensed like a big bang from the location of his death; but rather be an inner self with such continuity that it can only be named as a "spiritual body."  Body is a physical term and from the sensorial view point physicality is used as a metaphor of substantiality, meaning it is "really real."

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2025

The information about the lives of persons in the Hebrew Scriptures do not have the designation of being of the genre of biography.  In Romans times, "bios" was such a genre which the ancient Greeks also had.  The writers of the Gospels in their contexts were using "bios" genre as a presentation mode for the life of Jesus, but such presentations were tinged with "Risen Christ" mystagogy which meant that discerning readers had to perceive the difference between the literal and the spiritual.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2025

The predominance of modern science resulted in the classification of biblical writings as in the realm of the imaginary, and more like art or entertainment, and therefore lacking meaningful truths.  Religionists in a defensive inferiority complex posturing defended biblical stuff as scientific and so they themselves diminished the truth as beauty of mystical experiences and the discourses which such experiences produced. As people with language we have the ability to drive in different discursive lanes with meaningful truths representative of the kinds of experiences which produce the texts.

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2025

The multi-vocality of the writings in the collections of Scriptures which were voted to be canonical by human appraisers and assessors of their right to be the official text book for their various communities,  means that their variety changes their applicability to be in various ways and at various times depending upon the relevance of such applied meanings.  They also represent the inability of humans to attain the meaning of the love God, as in how was slavery once compatible with people who thought they were obeying God and now it isn't?

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2025

Some use the notion of "harmony" to say that God speaks with one voice through the Bible.  However, harmony actual implies multi-vocality.  Many voices together, different voices together.  One should honor the multi-vocality of the biblical texts of mere human being struggling to give voice to deal with the great questions of existence in their time in oft radically different ways.  The Bible is a collection of multi-vocality because it involves writers integrating the practices and cosmologies and the local knowledge of their times into their explication of their insights on how to live with the big questions of existence.  We are doing the same now in trying to integrate and synthesize insights from the "local" knowledge available to us to struggle in the art of living well.  We presume a discourse of totality not because we can speak with the authority of comprehending totality but because we assume that we are not alone because we are amidst everything else, past, present, and future.  Totality for us simply put is the EVER-MORE than us.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2025

Ancient history and ancient writings leave us guessing about the specifics of the contexts when they were written.  We are often left to use common sense intuition to try to translate ancient writings to our current lives.  Are the ancients so foreign to us that translations can only hint at a significant range of meanings?  There is so many writing about writing about writing such that the texts are layered with interpretations themselves.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2025

The care recommended by Jesus might be the ethical equivalent of the practice of triage in medicine; assess the urgency of the care needed and treat the most urgent cases first.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2025

Phrase from the Beatitudes in Luke: "God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked."  Is such kindness God's weakness as the hidden sustainer of all who lets the sun shine upon the good and the bad?  God's kindness is the weakness of allowing genuine freedom.  Human strength is determined by what side of good and evil we choose to be with our freedom.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2025

One's life can be analyzed by what one is passively and actively persuaded about.  Passively one receives the values of family and culture as the tacit persuasions of one's life.  Many of these go "unexamined" for one's entire life because one cannot "see" them.  Actively we take on new values as we are persuaded when confronted with the kinds of contrasts which require us to make value judgments which change our persuasions.  The New Testament word for faith, pistos, has the meaning in classical Greek, persuasion, which was the goal of the practice of rhetoric.  One's persuasions are perhaps forms the chief identities of one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2025

To appropriate the New Testament writings sensibly is to read them as explanation and teaching about the inward experiences of the writers using the genres available to them in the Roman context mixed with their appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures as templates for expounding on the meaning of the Risen Christ.  It is silly to import scientific discourse and modern eye-witness reporting genre onto the New Testament writings.  Today we have opposing parties fighting over the wrong thing; one says it's true because the natural laws were "miraculously" violated and they have modern eye witness accuracy, and the other side is saying they are not true because they violate the rule of empirical verification and the tenets of modern historicism.  The mystagogy of the New Testament can be meaningfully true even as a discourse of the Sublime.  There is no need to pit the scientific against the aesthetic.

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2025

Among the different kinds of love, agape, storge, philia, and eros, one is fortunate to combine them all on Valentine's day, to have unconditional love, friendship love, familial love, and the magnet of attraction.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2025

The logic of the Beatitudes is counter to what people normally would call a blessed and successful life experience.  Poverty, Sadness to the point of weeping, persecution and unpopularity,  being hated, and hunger:  Are these the states of blessedness?  And how is it that we sort of romantically assume this is the normal lifestyles of people who call themselves Christian today in situations of wealth, glee, popularity, and satiation?  The conditions of the beatitudes are what people try to avoid and this is regarded as being psychologically normal.  Interpreters have to do some intellectual gymnastics to appropriate them as being relevant to what most regard to be a healthy psychological and social life.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2025

"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation."  This phrase from the Lucan beatitude seems exactly counter to Marx's phrase, "religion is the opium of the people."  Wealth is the opium of the wealthy, i.e., the controlling substance which make wealth a curse.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2025

How do we make sense of the beatitudes from our vantage points of comfort and privilege?  Nietzsche called the beatitudes slave morality or a transvaluation of values.  Isn't poverty bad?  No, it's blessed.  American Christianity has idealized the beatitudes while requiring the blessed state of the beatitudes of the peoples whom we have oppressed while confessing ourselves as "Christians."  The slaves who were brought to America received in a trickle down way the message of Jesus, whom they came to love even when their masters did not practice the love Jesus toward them, but required of them to live the beatitude lifestyle as their "job" performance.  We should be very careful about proclaiming ourselves as "beatitude" Christians to avoid hypocrisy.  I think most American Christians understand themselves as being "reign with Christ" people who are claiming pre-heaven on earth privileges.

 Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2025

The Bible is a book with accounts of people of faith adjusting to many different conditions and provides insights for helping us adjust with wisdom in having the courage to changes the things we can while accepting the things we can't change.

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2025

Hope may be the positive name that we give for perpetual future and it is positive since it implies a comparative better than what has come before.  Hope is no guarantee that the future will be better but hope is what accompanies time and everything which happens to human within it.  It is the ultimate analgesic.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2025

Hope might be called nature's opium since the dangling carrot of a better tomorrow is a present analgesic.  Some people are just embarrassed because hope inspires invented narratives that are utopian, meaning, "no such actual places."

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2025

Even as Marx called the religion the opiate of the people, his own writings could be characterized as hopeful utopian literature wishfully hoping that good angelic people would prevail over bad people.  His kind of hope was its own form of mental opium.  Whatever our "ism," we rely on the analgesic of hope.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2025

Freud's book on religion is entitled, The Future of An Illusion, and we could also write books about The Future of Art and Cinema.  Freud means illusion in a pejorative way in that in his view religion cannot be mentally healthy behavior.  We should live our religion in meaningfully true ways just as we can live artistic lives meaningfully true in how we relate to significant mystery in our lives.  Bad religion can manifest signs of pathology; good religion can be embracing ourselves as multi-discursive beings who know how to keep the practice of each kind of discourse within their proper lane.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2025

Religion as faith perspective is a filtered way of processing the experiential data that one experiences.  Freud called such perspective an illusion.  Marx called it an opiate.  They were only partially right, since faith perspective involves coping with what is actually happening and to do so one often needs entertaining imagination as well as mind analgesics.  Just because religion can be imaginative and a pain soother does not mean that is all it is.  Many people get their mind analgesics and entertaining imagination experiences in places other than religion.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2025

Living is always already responding to stimuli.  The stimuli is the call and our responses are answers to that call.  God is the overload of all stimuli all at once which can be perceived as but a droning hum of the negligible because there is so much that confronts us.  We can only respond with our reductive funneling interpretation of what becomes apparent in its closeness to us.  The purpose of enlightened community is to provide filters of love and justice so that the call of God in its close apparency might reflect the values of love and justice.  The call of God is general in its oceanic flooding of us; the call of God is apparent in how it arrives specifically close to us in our particular circumstances.

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2025

Putting accumulating billionaires in charge of government is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2025

Interpret legal discourse as legal discourse, scientific discourse as scientific discourse, biblical discourse as biblical discourse with a community poetic of its own and be honest about its mystagogy.  Each discourse has telling meanings, or truths, according to its own internal interpretative rules.  Embrace the greater truth of humanity as multi-discursive practitioners.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2025

Ritual is real life theater.