Aphorism of the Day, March 2025

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2025

Heroic literature is written with accounts of portents, signs of the momentous to come.  Such devices are to emphasize the "wonder" which the writings promotes for the hero.  After something happens, writing about it in the "future anterior" tense, i.e. "it will have happened in this way," is the typical way of using "prophecy" to certify providence.  The Gospels are often heroic literature inventively unique using models from stories in the Hebrew Scriptures as well as the Greek classics as would have been available in the Greco-Roman setting for anyone reading and writing in the koine Greek.  The Gospel writers knew their reading and listening audience to know the effective way to promote their hero Jesus.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2025

In the quest to have the best and final version of "reality" we end up by only having one's latest version of one's very partial patch of reality.  It's always good to be humble about one's version of anything, as but the latest until the next latest version arises.

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2025

If God's version of the world is love, how can we imitate this within the many versions of the world that we come to have?

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2025

Language is the mode of what I would call "versioning."  With language we provide language products in writing, speaking, body choreographed deeds, our versions of what we think life and living is.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2025

If Jesus was said to be God emptied into the human, then humans are "emptied" into the limitations of their social and cultural contexts.  We should read the Bible as writings of people "emptied" into the limitations of their cultural contexts.  To try to make biblical writings as evidence of eternal omniscience is violate a believable notion of inspiration.

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2025

I tried to escape language by quiet meditation but I realized that everything always already was pre-coded by having language.

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2025

Having language is the supreme inwardness of humanity.  Being a language processor is the basic mysticism of life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2025

I write this even though I could have written that instantiating continuing authorial choices which are made in having language as the most mystical yet accessible inwardness of human being.

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2025

The purpose of rhetoric is persuasion.   Rhetoric is language crafted for persuasion.  The Bible is language crafted to persuade people.  The Bible is rhetoric.  The Greek word for persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric  is pisteuo, the same word in the New Testament is faith or belief.  Rhetoric is sometimes used as a pejorative of language being used to "con" people.  Rhetoric as the art of persuasion is positive if one is trying to convince people about what is good and just.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2025

The Bible as "Word of God" should be understood as the textbook of faith for various religious Christian and Jewish groups.  It became such with lots of faith in human beings who collected, read, and voted on which writings would comprise the various canon of Scripture which are used in various religious groups.  Why would we regard any humans as worthy of "voting" on what would comprise "God's word?"  We need to be as humble about how God's words came to their various collections as we need to be about any interpretation that we might presume about the ancient words themselves.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2025

Were not the Gospels written in part because the imminent end of the world in the generation of Jesus was delayed?

Aphorism of the March 20, 2025

The essence of human existence is being a language processor.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2025

Why aren't there people who are claiming to have experiences of the god Mithra today?  Probably because there is no continuous interpreting community to indicate to people that their inner experiences of the sublime can be articulated as being a Mithra experience.  The strength of Christianity stems from the pervasive presence and institutionalization of continuing interpretive communities in which the experiences of members are given the interpretive framework to name the deep echoes of the inward sublime.  The social imprint of interpretation upon the individual experience is crucial.

Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2025

Why does it seem like the Bible often has God presenting humanity with the "nuclear option?"  People and events are so bad, this earthly popsicle stand has to be blown up and destroyed.  The Flood and the development of various forms of the apocalyptic are varieties of the nuclear option.  Is this the visualization form for sufferers who believe the death of all things is at least the end of pain, suffering, and injustice?  However the continuation of time for life reveals the nuclear option as mere visualization, even if it means only the cockroaches or rocks survive.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2025

Ironically, the writing of the Gospels at a much later date than Paul's authentic writings are proof of an institutionalizing "church" which wasn't really needed in Paul's era because the imminent return of Jesus meant that family, marriage, and institutions would not be recommended because one would be "caught up in the air" at his return.  Why bother to plan to stay around if one was to be "caught up in the air?"  If Paul wrote twenty years after Jesus, wasn't the significant/permanent "delay" in the parousia already underway.

Aphorism of the Day, March 16, 2025

Not knowing the specific writing contexts for the biblical texts contributes to making them more mysterious.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2025

The paucity of ancient literature and widespread illiteracy meant that the few literary productions bore a more "omni-competent" role in their setting.  They had to be be more things to more people, than any piece of writing today which has limitations in its public function.  

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2025

How does one translate the fact of the imminent apocalyptic views of Jesus and Paul into our current world view with credibility?  One way is to note that the apocalyptic has moved into the cinematic where threats of endings and time travel are part of artistic entertainment.  Ancient consciousness was more unified in its language productions and not so specialized in genre or the division between political and spiritual in the statements by people who were regarded to be the more omni-competent in their midst.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2025

Many would like to force a harmony upon the biblical writings partly by positing ages of dispensations when God is "doing" different things at different times, and thus not "contradicting" an earlier divine view with a later one.  Biblical writings represent a collection of writings and the canon determiners decided that a variety of view points should be included within them because people could be inspired in different ways influenced by their particular situations.  This accounts for the apparent co-existence of final eschatology and realized eschatology within the Gospel writings.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2025

Reported communication with the divine in the Bible happens through visions, dreams, apparitions, divinations, filling with the Holy Spirit, and the result is language forms that are not like the language scientist use to report their empirical findings.  There is no reason to defend biblical language as being the language that we use in scientific reporting, and there is no reason to say the biblical writers were writing history as a modern historian does or as an eye-witness journalist would do.  Scholars sift through biblical writings along with other writings of the period and archaeological evidence to find believable facts among the better designated spiritual aesthetic writings of Scripture.  Poetry can have some "historical facts" but such facts are not the writing purpose of poetry.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2025

The New Testament in part is the mystical subjective experiences of Christian leaders giving administrative/institutional credibility for others to affirm similar subjective experiences as long as they do not contradict certain parameters in the interpretations of such experience as set by the leader.  Note that the writings of Paul include his expressive disagreement with and condemnation of people who had other "Christian" experience and explanations because they did not have his (Paul's) Gospel.

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2025

If in biblical times the sky that was seen was the literal abode of heavenly beings and for the Greeks the planets were gods all revolving around the earth and there was a third heaven up there, how does one translate the theological thinking which derived from having such a cosmology to our modern age where being heliocentric in our solar system seems a rather trivial insight in what we now know the universe to be?

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2025

The milieu of thought and cultural practice of biblical cultures is so far removed from us today that we have to do drastic translation and with interpretive sifting find what is applicable in terms of enduring love and justice in our own cultural context today.  To try to assume a one to one correspondence in ancient culture practices and best practices today is naive.  One often needs to heed what Joseph Campbell said, "Yesterday's virtues can be today's vice."

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2025

Does existing in language qualify as meaningful existence even if it cannot be empirically verified?  What about Love, which we seem to name under a constellation of interacting human behaviors and feelings, yet cannot really put into a laboratory?  God or gods are words which seem to have had meaningful use for people for a long time.  We can give non-corporeal things linguistic categorical status which are meaningful in social interaction without confusing them with how we use language in the scientific method.

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2025

Everything that comes to language is "equal" in having come to language.  But everything that comes to language is not "equal" in having the same kind of supposed extra-linguistic existence.  A tree, a unicorn, and God have come to language but they have significantly different status in sensorial knowable existence.  Does something have to have empirically verifiable experience to be meaningfully true?  Various notions of God have vast socially verifiable results in communal behaviors in the actual history of people's lives.  It is unrealistic to argue against the fact of the functional reality of notions of God that have come to have traditions within human language users.  Ultimately we are arguing about language with language about language products by language users.  And the Gospel of John states that the Word was God.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2025

How do we translate meanings from the cosmological geocentric world view of the biblical writers to our world in knowing that our earth is but a speck in the vast universe?  What remains is that we, like biblical writers, are prisoners of our anthropocentric views.  We understand that the exterior world is also a human interior world in that it is mediated through human language which is an interior phenomenon.  We have language lenses through which we see the world and we see the world differently according to the lenses through which we bring to language production what we think we are seeing and experiencing.  We see things scientifically, mythically, ethically, juridically, socially, and aesthetically and these ways of seeing come to language in different ways including how we understand and manipulate the exterior world.  Most of our human problems occur because of the confusion in practice of how we see the world.  The biblical writers for us hindsight critics understand that they were limited by what they did not yet know.  We too are limited by what we do not yet know, and when we are not humble, we minimize the truth of what we do not yet know, which will of course later deconstruct our best knowledge.  However, when it comes to love, kindness, and justice we should boldly act now on our highest insights about these human interaction virtues and let the future bring judgment on how we performed love, kindness, and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2025

Lent is a season to learn how to fast from certain things so as to be open to better actuarial living responses to the probabilities of life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2025

There was a man so driven

On Tuesday to be quite shriven

He overdid Mardi Gras

with way too much foie gras

And now he needs to be forgiven

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2025

What often happens in poetry is the confounding of the literal mind to point to the truth of the complexity of an infinite number of things being in relationship with each other and so in humility we are brought to honor the mystery of not knowing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2025

Life as metamorphosis or transfiguration means changing appearances with such phase differentiation that unless one observes the transition, one could not believe in continuity of a constituted being.  Is the butterfly the same being as the egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis?  Yes, the same but in significantly different appearance.  St. Paul had a vision of human beings with spiritual bodies which have continuing existence after death.  The Transfiguration was presented as a pre-resurrection event of the surfacing of the the inner spiritual body of Jesus making his face shine.  It is an illustrative account to promote human life as a transfiguring life with the reappearance of the Risen Christ being spiritual proof of afterlife continuity in another phase of being/becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2025

If life is but the continuous transfiguration of energy from one appearance to another, what is it about human life which remains?  Having language.  The Bible witness is about language about language......naming continuous naming.   Creation happens by God speaking, meaning the divine and language are coextensive.  Christ is the Eternal Word who is God.  The light of the shiny face of Christ on the mountain in terms of appearance was phase specific in contrast to how Jesus must have appeared on the cross.  What always remains as all and in all, in that anything can be known at all, is having language.