Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2025
The Gospels and Acts could be rhetorical attempts to reconcile Jesus, the teaching rabbi known by Peter and James with the Risen Christ known by Paul in visionary experience.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2025
Have you noticed that religion, faith communities, yogis, gurus, prophets, preachers have not eradicated gaping social and economic inequities throughout history, and have often been parties to maintaining the discrepancies between the haves and have nots? Can we really say that religions have created ideologies which have engendered societies which have benefited women, children, and shunned minority persons in communities? Some would say but it would have been worse without religion. Or religion is really about foster micro-communities to take care of those very local to one's needs and interest. But lots of people don't have caring micro-communities. If powerful people are not inclined to the stewardship of care for other people, the inequities will persist and the neglect will continue.
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2025
Most of the biblical writings were generated during times when the rulers were corrupt and greedy and even cruel. As such the writings are motivated by the survival impulse of oppressed people who were learning to maintained with the mere trickle down "crumbs" of justice that were afforded them. What happens in our biblical interpretation when we ourselves know the favor of the ruling class?
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2025
Some of the sayings attributed to Jesus are loaded with hyperbole and irony. Oral tradition with intonation variations have the feature of over-throwing what on the "literal textual surface" seems obvious. Text cannot truly represent certainty about ironic voices, but it can hint at variations of possible voicings.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2025
Finding God in one's life or Christ is a matter of rhetorical propriety. God and Christ exist in language traditions of humanity as tropes for the mystery of invisible Greatness and as the confession of how the effects of the greatness might be translated into human terms, of God being with us, affirming our unavoidable human prison of being merely human and always already living with continuous anthropomorphic projections.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2025
Ideas that have "won" the day were not necessarily as winsome in the time of their so call "origin."
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2025
Movements only become so retroactively based upon whether an originating idea catches on. That ideas catch on do not make them true except in the historical sense in "it is true that they happened." Truth should be qualified by whether ideas result in meaningful practice of love and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2025
People offer excuses to let certain discursive functions of their lives go undeveloped especially those which help us tap into wonder. It is too childish to give time to such as our societies have become rife with all kinds of addictions. We carry the portable image of God within us and discursive practices of awareness of such a treasure, however we name it, can be a better use of energy than the demand which addictions require.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2025
Deconstruction is based upon the reality of language signifying what is not language as an Invisible which constantly turns the tumbler of language to rearrange the furniture of faux appearances of the Invisible in language.
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2025
As human language users we live in the third space, the liminal space, the threshold space between structure and process. We live deconstructively.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2025
We live in the dilemma between structure and process, between language as a totalizing system which seems to be closed based upon the notion that existence could be "freeze framed" and stopped and the obvious experience of temporality means nothing is ever "stopped" or freeze-framed. Time is continual openness to change, yes change in the here-to-fore structures assumed to be final. To complicate matters, we even try to "structure" process by declaring stable or consistent patterns of process but then that such theory is open to be falsified in the future, it is rendered unstable. Can temporality as perpetual instability be structured? Is it a oxymoron to say that structuration is the stable theory? It is an effort to overcome the dichotomy between structure and process by saying, "Process is Structure." This is in fact the bi-polar method of Process Philosophy in the insight of Being regarded to be the reductive abstraction from states of Becoming. As in my name Phil is a reductive abstraction from all the continuously becoming occasions of Phil-hood. Phil represents an enforced reductive unity upon the entire community of occasions of becoming. But Phil-ness has to include future self-surpassing states of Phil-ness.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2025
June 19th, or Juneteenth, is about the arrival, or the space-time delay in the arrival of the knowledge of the declaration of Emancipation. It took time for the Emancipation news to arrive finally in Galveston, TX. But even the late arrival of the news of Emancipation was an important date to remember and celebrate. Justice is something that is easily forgotten in practice and it is continually delayed and so it continually needs new arrivals again and again. Some factions in America recently have been trying to studiously cover up our history of injustice so as to indoctrinate a new generation wrongly about who we have been as a people. Juneteenth is a day to let the truth of justice vis a vis the history of our historic injustice arrive again to us.
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2025
Where does evil and badness originate? We look for the source within the human person. We look for psychological motivation and when a person seems helpless to have self-control we look for inward power complexes which control one to the point of acting out. Some forms of "being out of control" came under the taxonomy of possession with an "unclean" spirit in psychology of various portions of the Bible. The system of declaring something clean or unclean was a social purity code in which the religious codes and their enforcer functioned as "public health authorities." Jesus is presented as one who challenged the shunning that the public health designations caused in isolating a person from the means of healing which had to include their acceptance within community.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2025
There have been various explanation for the unsuccessful relations of the inner life to the outer life such that "acting out" causes fear and harm to those who experience such expressions of trauma. The ancient explanation often was attributed to unclean spirits possessing and causing the frightful acting out. Pauline attributed writings include a cosmology of principalities and powers in the air. The Gospels present Jesus as a spiritual warrior overcoming these inner powers and being a people whisperer in restoring people to have freedom of agency. Programmatically, this is seen in the stories of Jesus expelling the demons and commanding them to go to other places. The Gospel church proclaimed Jesus as a heavenly being with power over the dark forces in the invisible interior places.
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2025
Our world is filled with events of acted out violence. The interior hatred of people, parties, and countries for each other has come to be acted out in violent ways in invasions, assassinations and physical attacks. The interior diabolical has come to flesh and blood violence. The collateral damage to everyday folk just wanting to get on with the sustenance details of their lives is pronounced. The truth is that the very few who have the power and means to hurt overwhelms the ordinary and quotidian kindness in acts of invading war and violence. We look to the action of kindness to heal and restore us in the aftermath of the very few evil, greed, violent person who want to magnify their hatred to defy that God is love, and that love is the normal calling to be human in the best way.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2025
The Trinity as insightful meanings for speaking about dynamic connection and relationship at the center of life implying personhood superior but inclusive of human personhood has found an adequate hearing among many for whom theism has been the language tradition used to approach the holy Negligible of what we don't know but still mysteriously affects us.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2025
The tradition of gods in Hebrew Scripture is a transition from henotheism countering polytheism, that is, a belief in a supreme God over the other gods, and arriving at a more strict monotheism after the Babylonian exile. The understanding of the Trinity could perhaps be the insight of over-coming the notion of God in the negative sense of not being anything that we can say, to the positive sense of the Trinity being what can be said.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2025
The Holy Trinity in context could mean that the former underlying Greek philosophical understanding which supported its proposal at Nicaea is not a generally accepted philosophical context today. But the Holy Trinity has become the tacit background of the church for many years without much rethinking about its connection to other philosophical ways to provide insights. The Holy Trinity today, just "goes without saying" in its general acceptance for orthodoxy.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2025
That there is a God, that we think we know God, is based upon the prior assumption that we have language as language users who have come to name everything that we think that we experience. I had a non-language experience of God, but I used "non-language experience" to register such an event. Pretending to have life without language is like pretending to be another wordless creature or a perpetual infant who will never activate language ability. All negative theology comes to positive theology because language is co-extensive with such phrases as everything, everywhere, all at once. Language is a time bound sequential reduction of the everything that always already confronts us, but we can't help but commit the language impulsive response to everything. Since language events are occasions in time they are limited even as in a moment one uses the phrase "everlasting" and "eternal" even though "everlasting" cannot be limited to its own proclamation in a moment of utterance.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2025
Creeds, doctrines, and even Holy Scriptures are drastic abbreviations of eternal word and what can actually come to language. Such abbreviations are like rafts of language traditions localized to give book ends for stories of meanings in the oceanic morass of information on which we always already live. Such abbreviations are for the promulgation of the intended knowledge of the influential leaders and power brokers of various social groups in historical settings. The use of Creeds and doctrine are efforts to focus on how to read the Holy Scriptures in "preferred" ways for the coherence of the community. Creeds and doctrinal statements bear the motivation of trying to avoid the contradictions that can occur when many readers of Holy Scriptures read them in differently. Creeds and doctrines cannot avoid bearing the "ideology" of the way in which truth is "administered."
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2025
The articulation and promulgation of the doctrine of the Trinity at the first Council of Nicaea, happened in the reign of and because of Constantine I who was a deified human being in the cult of the Emperor, who co-existed with the 12 main gods and goddesses of the Roman pantheon as well as 67 other divine beings, each of which served as patron deities for certain locales/families. Other human figures were also "deified," such as famous generals or important family figures. Such deification process perhaps was the proto-process for the future cult of saints. The articulation of the Trinity co-existed with Hebrew theism which included the history of the One God gaining ascendency over the other gods and goddesses in the various environments of the development of the Hebrew religion. Certainly one could say that the rise of the Trinitarian confession had a unique innovation in using Platonic categories of essences and emanations to articulate a way to speak about the way in which Christians were formulating the various writings about Jesus as Son, of God his Father, who was also baptized by the Holy Spirit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2025
When pondering the Trinity one can arrive at the insight that Language bears all contradictions in a both/and way, meaning the One God can be Three Persons in perhaps Language or Eternal Word as the Unity of all thinking and knowing that and how we exist.
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2025
If we are continuously confronted by God and everyone and everything else as the "other," how can unity be? Perhaps God isn't the other, but the entire cosmic personal environment within which we live and move and have our being, such that we and all are relative because we have relative environments. God has no environment in that there is nothing outside of God; God is the environment. If the Beatles sang, "we all live in a yellow submarine," we should rather sing, "We all live in the One environment of God."
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2025
What is the most accessible conception of Oneness or Unity? It is the One expanding Container of All, continuous in continuity with its former Self as it surpasses itself in greatness. A functional notion of unity for all entities within this Great Expanding Container is to humbly admit togetherness as definitive of life and work to express the most excellent togetherness as the harmony of justice, in giving each its due.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2025
The unity of a pipe organ is the "one" wind supplied to the chests on which the different pipes are sitting like whistles waiting to be sounded when pipe-hole valve is opened. But is Wind manifested in time the same wind? What is the limitation of the using wind as a metaphor of Unifying Spirit when both wind and Holy Spirit continue to manifest in time at "different" times. On the surface the different manifestations often seem to contradict each other. If the Divine is an Invisible Reality on which all the pipe-holes of actual life sit, the whole of actual life means that the One Reality plays the entirety of the world of differences. Hence, harmony among differences would be the most fitting effect of unity in a world of differences. Harmony in the world is contradicted by war and conflict. Saying that one has to have the highest and most aloof view of the world of differences to appreciate the "higher harmonies" can be a serious minimization of real pain espousing the view that the local and temporal is always sacrificed for some "greater" purpose.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2025
The Jesus of the Synoptics is presented as a parable telling wisdom teacher. The Jesus of John's Gospel is more like a topical homilist.
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2025
How artificial is AI? Does it not exist within the realm of human language users who are not artificial? Is AI a growing reservoir of data to be continuously accessed with focussed requests to collate regarding a chosen topic? Does AI have independence, i.e., independent "agency" from the human agents who use it? Does the same phrase, "garbage in, garbage out" pertain to AI regarding quality of output and/or any evidence of AI ethical or moral products? Does moral and ethical only pertain to AI users and not to AI products? AI as a semi-human entity creates an new class of "being" in the world.
Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2025
The story of Babel is a simplistic "origin" myth about how we went from a mono-glottic world to a poly-glottic world. The unity of everyone speaking the same language resulted in people deciding that they in unity could "replace" the one God. So, God punished them with the confusion of tongues dividing and scattering people to reside with their own language users. The myth of one language resulting in automatic unity is humorously countered in the Shavian/Wilde comment, "The British and Americans are peoples divided by having a common (one) language." In similar simplistic Pentecost interpretation, people of many different languages are unified when in their different languages they speak about the unifying topic, Jesus Christ. Not so humorously, we can sadly observe, "The many different Christian groups have been divided by having a common Savior, Jesus Christ." Unity is a confessional "hum/droning sound" in the hyper-cacophony of the sounding and writing of many languages and many speakers and writers in the same language with contradictory interpretations about the various "Christ" data. Why isn't the same and one interior Spirit within all making sure speakers and writers use the same script? Perhaps the unity is the One Field of many meanings? That everyone assumes a "greater" or even "greatest" Field in different ways might be the elusive Unity.
Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2025
How can unity or oneness be in the world of obvious differences? By reconfiguring unity as harmony of everything playing together in one sound. By positing one expanding container of all which always already has synchronicity. By positing a sub-molecular nano-substance which is the deep structure of everything and only gets creatively differentiated in widely varied immanence.
Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2025
Time is a human experience within the material world of objects, things, having a continuous binary of before and after. The after seems to supplant or replace the before while carrying in it an identity with what was before but can only access the before which has past with a trace, and the trace exists in language as the technology of memory for what we think has been or has been experienced.
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