Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2025
One is born into so many compete language traditions such that to live as a language user is to live a contradicted life even to prove it by asserting I am completely consistent religiously or I am completely consistent scientifically.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2025
Writing is always for the present tense or current time of the writer. Study of the Bible is the near impossible task of trying to figure out the "current time" of the writing occasion, since there has been so much editing and redacting over long periods of time, and writing for one's current time, one cannot help but make the past and the future serve one's own limited values in that current time. The Bible records contradictions in values of biblical writers over time, including over things that might seem trivial as what one can eat.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2025
New information and new knowledge even if is "old" but only recently discovered, changes the context for knowing. Archaeologists continually find "old" things which require new conclusion to replace even long held conclusions about past history.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2025
Does quantity include quality? The most, assumes having the quality of being the largest or greatness. Could a Greater Expanding Container of everything accumulating everything in expansion of omni-occasions, include having occasions of personality and language such that such expansion might through language and personality be called qualitatively the greatest personal Being? Language users with personality might assume their superior to a the very least have language and personality. The greatest arrives at a point in becoming to submit to the anthropomorphism of humanity in being named and having a personhood.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2025
Having language is like catching a virus and becoming the host for it to thrive and grow in us exponentially like a parasite. Having language also comes with a significant volition meaning how we constitute our lives with language makes a difference, particular as language becomes flesh in body language acts of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2025
Word is the continuous inside job being done upon us in invisible ways even if we use the term as the metaphorical term for invisible breath or wind implying a force or reality with known effects.
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2025
We try to reconstruct Christian origins from textual traces which are more than one hundred years after the supposed events. We assume that these traces contain written down oral evidence of eye-witnesses. We also discover that many followers of Christ later became regarded to be heretics even when they did not know themselves as such in their own time. Most of the writings of the so called "heretics" were destroyed by the parties which had power to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2025
Academics use the term "peer reviewed," meaning they have submitted their work to people of similar academic training for appraising the quality of their research methodology. In a sense we all live "peer reviewed" lives based upon the "authorities" to whom we appeal to appraise the meaning and actions of our lives. Obviously life includes many "peer" groups with competing values but what they have in common is the features of social identity and sense of belonging.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2025
When we say, "the word of the Lord," after reading Scripture in the liturgy, we cannot mean that such means that God affirms all the social customs and practices that were tolerated and legislated by peoples of the ancient biblical cultures.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2025, Easter Monday
We assume human language users before we come to name God and before we solidified the writings which comprise Holy Scriptures. Holy Scriptures derived within communities of human language users. When ancient language bald use in Scriptures seem to completely offend common notions of love and justice, especially when we do not have access to contexts in which the ironic could overturn plain meaning, we have the obligation to interpret toward what would promote love and justice in our lives now.
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2025, Easter Sunday
The destination of the virtue of the future is called hope. One can say that people are born with latent hope and it remain in each as an original blessing even as the hard knocks of living result in people losing access to it. Easter is a story to reactivate that latent hope as always already within us and give us the immortality of being on an everlasting train.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2025, Holy Saturday
The last shall be first. The later or latest recipients of a tradition has the later word in interpreting the meaning of what happened earlier so those who were earlier seem to be first in history end up being unable to control the meaning of what they thought were happening in their lives. In reading the Gospels we are reading much later imputed meanings for the mists of the transmission of the oral accounts of Jesus. Gospel writers and Paul take liberties of being those who set the meanings for what they believed to have happened decades before. The meanings, if we believe the accounts of Paul, come from his mystical and divinized experiences of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2025, Good Friday
Good Friday is a day to ponder how horrible things can become regarded to be necessarily providential, which is in fact the dominate theme of the New Testament, how and why was the death of Christ necessarily providential? One might say it was because of the mystical intoxication of Hope, like the hopeful intoxication of Julian of Norwich who seems to naively proclaim, "all manner of things will be well, indeed." Ergo, the death of Jesus will be Good Friday, indeed.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2025
If God is omnipresent, then that omnipresent One would want love, justice, and sharing to be the rule of human living. However, such omnipresence co-exists with genuine freedom for people to choose to neglect love, justice, and sharing, so an omnipresent, omnipotent One accepts the weakness/strength of restraint in the face of genuine freedom. If freedom is truly shared, then the powerful one who shares freedom submits to the weakness caused by lesser agents choosing wrongly.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2025
Actual, probable, and possible are three interpretative positions. Actual as what is and what has been provide the data for pondering the probable and possible in the future. Actual is complicated by including in it all of the interior acts of language, so that things like unicorns may be actual in language but not actual in empirical experience. Actuality includes what comes to language and things can come to language which do not have the further status of empirical verification as being seen or touched. It can be empirically verified that God, gods, and goddesses, Spirit, and much more comes to language in apparent meaningful ways for people who use such terms, without having seeing and touching reality, i.e. they are "invisible." Such such "invisible" reality effect bodily actions in human behaviors which definitely have resulting seeing and touching empirical verification. It is however sad to note that belief in the invisible God has often had the empirically verified effects of war and hatred on behalf of that God, even to the point of canceling out the love and goodness which people confess God to be. Lots of atheism has been born out of badly representing the God of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2025
From observation within human experience, the divine has become named, for various reasons. Perhaps causation, perhaps to express wonder at the sheer plenitude of All, perhaps to project the very best of what we think we are upon a Being who has to be bigger than we are because we know that we have individually and collectively a limited duration. The Pre, during, and Post One to us must be Sustainer with a Personality, because we can only speak in personal terms.
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2025
One should continually appraise the use of religious affiliation and resulting effects for the benefit of the world. Does such an affiliation function to further cloister one into thinking God functions primarily for the benefit of me and my group, so does one's affiliation function to promote a profound love for the world of diverse people and environments?
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2025
The Passion Narratives were written and re-written and edited perhaps between the years 70 and 100, in part because the Son of Man had not yet come in the clouds as had been promised, so if the delay was seeming to be permanent, a written teaching "permanent" record had to be created to build communities of people in perpetual waiting. Life is about "waiting" for what may come; but waiting should be pro-active by getting as much done as possible during the waiting.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2025
Why did the Gospels need to be written? In part, because of the delay of the Son of Man coming in the clouds. The Gospels record Jesus saying the Son of Man would come in the generation of his immediate hearers. So, the Gospels record such an expectation even while being proof that it did not yet happen. If the world is not ending then the "message" has to be institutionalized by having writings to perpetuate the message into a future of the continued delay of the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds to catch up believers with those who had died.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2025
Sometimes Holy Scriptures can seem to be writings of people who after reporting everything that has gone wrong in their lives and everything that has gone right in their lives try to talk themselves into believing a loving, kind, all powerful God. Whether we know it or not, we cannot but experience everything impinging upon us always. So we are bearing everything always even if our languaged lives funnel but bits of it to us in the capacity limitations of a moment in time. The Bible is a collection of sayings that are like spaghetti thrown at the wall to see if they will stick in having meanings. And everything which comes to language in speaking and writing, has meaning or meanings. It is up to us to continually assess the pragmatic usefulness of such meanings and the highest criteria for assessing pragmatic usefulness might be love and justice for the common good.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2025
To be a language user is to be continuously involved in valuing. We cannot help but be continuous classifiers of everything that can and does come to language in the manifold ways that coming to language happens in our lives. Language itself is a valuing system in having syntax and grammar. We are always already caught within a system of valuing. Language is axiology.
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2025
By the time the Passion accounts came to textual form in the Gospels, the death of Jesus had been adapted in the Pauline writings as a spiritual method of understanding the death and resurrection of Christ as an internal divination process for living a continually being transformed life.
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2025
Do we return to the Passion of Jesus over and over again because we still have not achieved acceptance about why the best get taken from us untimely and we still think it perpetually unfair that really bad things happen to really good people whose continued presence we believed we still needed to heal this life?
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2025
Making sense of the death of someone or accepting death of someone is a very individual process, and it is also communal when a person's life is shared by many others. The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus and the claims about the indwelling Risen Christ could mean that the horrible death of Jesus had to be given providential meanings because the memory of his life was able to perpetuate within communities an interpretive frame work for people to characterized their inner most experience as being a life altering encounters with Holy Spirit/Risen Christ. This interpretive "stamp" on one's interior experience was the social process of communal identity. The fact that the first three centuries included such a wide diversity of the meanings of the life of Jesus means that different locales had different interpretive meanings for the significance of the life of Jesus.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2025
What is the difference between what comes to language and what doesn't? That which doesn't come to language is not known. Knowing and coming to language cannot be separated. But I know "intuitively" so how is that coming to language? Intuitively is a word, and the named experience exists within the plethora of a worded universe.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2025
The three-fold sources of authority for the church, Scripture, Tradition, and Reason, really reside in human traditions. Scriptures are texts coming to eventual canonical forms within human community who exercise human reason in their own time and place, which is to say theology is anthropology seeking the human superlative for how to live best. And we still use what has been regarded as best to influence now how we come to define how to live best in the way of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2025
To say that knowledge of home run king Babe Ruth meant Hank Aaron would ultimately break his record is not true. To say that Babe Ruth's record opened up the probability for it to eventually be broken, is true. Knowledge of Moses did not guarantee that some people would eventually proclaim Jesus as one who "surpassed" him. When one is regarded to be a surpassing type of figure, the discussion centers around who is being surpassed in greatness. The past is strategically used to affirm values in the present since association with antiquity is a rhetorical trope of gravitas.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2025
In reusing phrases from Hebrew Scriptures to speak about how followers of Jesus understood and presented Jesus does not mean that writers of the Hebrew Scriptures had Jesus of Nazareth in mind when they wrote.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2025
A chief purpose of religion is to impart social identity built around highest insights and values for community betterment, because we can do more together than we can do as island individuals. Too often religious groups become more about maintaining their own visible presence than about doing the common good. When the common good is reduced to "agreeing with me and joining my group" the exalted purpose of religion is lost.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2025
St. Paul regarded the Law to be something like an April Fools joke because of the inherent contradiction. He could think that he was doing okay with the first nine commandments but the tenth commandment made fulfilling the law humanly impossible. Don't covet! Do not ever desire wrongly. What if one's internal engine of desire projects on things that one is not supposed to have? Wretched man that I am for having desire! It's one thing to have impulse control, it's another thing to have the impulses in the first place and be judged as a law breaker for even having the impulses. Juridical courts do not convict for merely thinking about breaking the law; apparently the law of God does.
