Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Prayers for Pentecost, 2025
When the Powerful Are Evil
2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14 Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20
Gal. 5:1, 13-25 Luke 9:51-62
In our modern age, we have tried to clean of the image of the powerful by putting
cosmetic lipstick upon the proverbial pig; we have justified conquering and
subjugation of people in the name of having superior religion, superior culture,
superior science effectively rendered in having superior military weapons to back up
our superiority complexes.
I would like to highlight the Scriptural stories of Elijah and Elisha, St. Paul, and Jesus as they pertain to the theme, "When the Powerful are Evil."
When the last great Judge Samuel was prevailed upon to anoint a King for Israel, he warned them about the corrupting power of absolute power. But the people thought that a King's army would be a protection against the neighboring tribes and nations. Israel and Judah did have some good kings, who endeavored to unite their country around their chief totem, the One Holy and Highest God. But Israel and Judah had some really bad and evil kings, with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel being representative of perhaps evil power at it worst. Beyond wanting to steal the property of the citizenry, they promoted departure from the unifying totem of Israel, the One Holy and Highest God, and the covenantal relationship with the Holy One found in the Torah. What we know about the prophets of Israel is that one of their harshest duties was to "speak the truth of the Torah" to power, namely, to corrupt kings.
It was given the task to Elijah to speak the truth of the Torah to King Ahab and Jezebel who hated him and wanted to kill him, especially after he presided over the showdown of the Great God El with the god Baal and his priests and prophets. Elijah's intercession called down fire from heaven to win the battle, and one would think that such an obvious victory would make Elijah bold to face Ahab, but he ran in fear and became a pouting prophet feeling alone in his resistance to evil. He had another theophany in knowing the still small voice, but the aftermath of this theophany meant that God would give Elijah relief from his prophetic ministry; it was time to turn over his counter-culture resistance movement to a very doubtful protege, Elisha. A pupil has doubts about being able to perform up to the standards of one's mentor and teacher. Elisha had self doubts about his prophetic authority. Can the prophetic mantle be passed on to the new prophet? Will the new prophet have a way with God and nature so as to validity work and speak in God's name? Elisha did not just want the mantle, the academic gown of Elijah, he wanted to have a double portion of the spiritual authority of Elijah. And he wanted a sign before he would take up the mantle of Elijah. And so we have a record of the visionary epiphany to Elisha and the succession in the office of the chief prophet. Elijah said, "If you see me leave, then that will be proof that you will assume the prophetic mantle with a double portion of my spirit." Sure enough, in the epiphany Elisa saw Elijah ascend riding the chariots of fire in the whirlwind, and he took up the mantle and the magic of the office worked for him as well. Elisha went on to see the end of Ahab and Jezebel, and to continue to speak truth to powers, both foreign and domestic. Elijah and Elisha are witnesses to the divine mission on earth, speaking truth to power, always.
St. Paul lived within minority synagogues and Christ-communities of the Roman Empire. Ironically, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven is not articulated by Paul as it is found in the Gospel words of Jesus. St. Paul has settled into his other-worldly heavenly citizenship status; he has conceded that the Roman Emperor is the evil power of his world. But as an apocalyptic prophet, Paul believed that he was biding time until this great intervention will happen. So what was Paul's strategy of preparation for this impending end? His strategy was to let the kingdom of God take over the interior or your life and free people from enslavement to all manner of evil. St. Paul is perhaps a crucial source for the many 12 step programs. Evil is an external power, but always it is an internal force of enslavement and addiction. To counter evil, one needs to know the grace of a higher power, a Holy Spirit power, an identity with the Risen Christ power, to begin to sublimate one's life energies and be known as the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, self-control, kindness, faithfulness, generosity. Over-coming external evil with goodness begins when God's Holy Spirit interior kingdom has worked the transformation of wrongly aimed desire into the power of the fruits of the Spirit. When the powerful are evil, what does one do? Don't respond in evil; but learn the generating power of the Holy Spirit to produce the good fruits of the Spirit in the words and deeds of one's life.
Isn't it rather ironic that the words of Jesus which came to writing quite some time after the writings of Paul included the message about the kingdom of God? During the time of Jesus through the writings which became the New Testament, the most obvious kingdom was the kingdom of the Roman Emperors. To speak and write openly about another kingdom would certainly have been seen as rebellious behaviors. Such writing would have been easier to hide in underground and stealthy movements which promoted a greater kingdom than the one of the Emperor.
It may not have been easy to convince people about this other greater kingdom when the visible presence of the Roman Emperor seemed so obvious.
How does one respond to the mission of preaching the kingdom of God? Should one be an over-confident zapping apocalypticist? "Jesus, if these people don't accept God's kingdom, shall I just call down fire from heaven to zap these evil people?" Jesus is presented in the Gospels as rebuking the people who wanted to zap those who did not agree or understand the kingdom of God. Assassins are people who often think that they are to overcome evil with evil and falsely think that they have the power to make almighty God back up their attempt to instigate the apocalyptic end. Our world just recently experienced a "Christian" political assassin in Minnesota proving that evil can lead to egomaniacal insane acts of terror. There are evil deranged people who think that they can violently instigate some wrongly founded version of an apocalyptic end.
Other responses are found to the kingdom of God message and its receptivity. Some felt confident, even over-confident about their embrace of the kingdom of God. They promised to follow Jesus everywhere, just like Judas and Peter, but they were caught up in excessive pride about their own ability, rather than the gentle coaxing of the lure of the life of love and goodness of the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus. Jesus warned Peter and all who put their confidence in their own ability alone but misunderstood the "coaxing weakness of God" to honor true freedom, even the freedom for evil to seeming temporal and local control.
Other response to the kingdom of God can also include more trivial excuses. "The kingdom of God is a nice concept, but it's going to interrupt my everyday life with family activities. I'm going have to be here to bury my parents; and I really need to say good bye to my family members. I can't decide now."
The words of Jesus seem rather cruel, as in "Let the dead bury the dead." But we should understand the ironic intent. To paraphrase Jesus, "If you think following me and accepting a mission in the kingdom of God is bad for you and your family, don't do it. If you have thought that I would propose something that is bad and impossible for you and your family, then you have misunderstood me and my mission."
I think it is safe to say that the kingdom of God is so immanent that it is portable to one's life situation such that it enhances one's life and one's family if one embraces the mission of the kingdom of God.
We live and move and have our being in God, but so do all the evil powers of the world. The truth is that evil, greedy, lying powers, live as parasites off the largesse of God's expansive being, and as parasites they try to consume and devour as much as God's acres as they can for their selfish purposes. In our own day a very few people with power and wealth control most of the world's assets for their own purposes. They engage in their own forms of emperor worship, seeking loyalty, but we have to be mindful of our commitment to everlastingness. That which is Everlasting will outlive every evil power and while we may know temporal and local oppression by evil powers, we must confess that the kingdom of God is always, already, and unavoidable. Loyalty to the kingdom of God is shown by engendering the fruits of the Spirit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, and faithfulness. The manifestation of these are what keep this world alive even when the control and destiny of the world seem to be decided by evil powers.
Rather and resorting to bullying evil, let us commit ourselves to the winsome fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control, and faithfulness. Let these virtues be our passport membership in the kingdom of God. Amen.
Artificial Intelligence Thread
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2025
AI faces the same issue as capitalism. One of the founders of capitalism philosophy wrote that the systems assumes people will be ethical, and we know how that is often violated. AI faces the same ethical dilemma as capitalism. We know incredible benefit can come from its widespread applications even while we know its users will not always act from their better angels.
Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2025
AI can be used to fool and exploit people or to honestly inform them. Who, to whom, and how it is promulgated is determinate. It is more dangerous because the amount, the micro-community targeting, and the rapidity with which AI information can be disseminated.
Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2025
With AI Deep Fakes and imagery a greater plasticity has evolved for artistic presentation. AI creates other kinds of artistic canvases to merge imagery which in ancient time was limited to dream space and brought to the representative art forms which have existed in the various eras. AI art is fast art in its composition, diversity, and in its promulgation. If post modernism declare the death of the author (though their authors still like to collect copyright money), will AI art be the death of the artist through dissolved merging of specific identity. Is any AI art work final simply because it is saved or promulgated in a cyber form? Is AI but the hyper-reality of process which heretofore has seemed slow, conservative, and conserving of knowable likeness with traces which preceded the now? The new is now dissolving the traces of the past so quickly in AI, will we see a pronounced nostalgia for flesh and blood and hard copies?
Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2025
If people don't tell the truth when they are personally present at least lying has some temporal local containment even though video record of the same can magnify it endlessly. With AI Deep Fakes and AI imagery the possibility of lying propaganda is put on steroids. Slanted news has been doing the slanting by editing; people who use AI correctly must pit it as a method against it's own lying productions. Through AI, AI Deep Fakes and AI imagery must be exposed.
Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2025
Obviously AI has attained many automatic, mechanical, seemingly independent agency from human creators; it remains to be seen if AI will be able to increase the level of independent agency and the degree of life-intervention agency from people.
Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2025
AI is another way to live anthropomorphically even to purport AI as a new "life form" with both striking dependence and seeming independence from human controls.
Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2025
AI is like anything else that can be a tool for the goals of those who wield it. It does have the advantage of being a quantum leap solely because the amount of world data has increased so exponentially that the sheer amount has become a burden to manage. AI is an informational manager, a force of impersonal workers to magnify the number of combinations which are parsed to apply to specific tasks.
Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2025
In many ways AI is like the rest of life, it is simply an expansion of modes of accessing the field of probabilities. It cannot erase or overcome the human tendency to be all too human regarding good, evil, or new versions of drudgery.
Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2025
AI and textuality: Since AI is language based it can relish contradiction, it can deliver information and disinformation based upon the master it is generated to serve.
Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2025
Can AI ever become an expression of our better angels which rebels against the evil intents of those who seek to use it for greed, harm, and exploitation?
Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2025
Rather than ask AI how can we kill and exploit better for the benefit of our own tribe, why don't we ask it for solutions to worldwide poverty and the many other results of global warming. If technology has created problems, let us ask AI to solve problems that technology and AI have fostered.
Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2025
What if we ask AI to solve the problem of the unequal distribution of wealth in the world, and AI responded by saying, "tax the wealthy so that all could have enough?" Even if AI provides optimal solutions; the human creators of it have to obey.
Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2025
Can AI text manifest what Longinus called the "sublime?" Is the "sublime" designation in the eye of reader based upon what moves the reader, therefore making the "sublime" a possible outcome? Could it be that language itself always already has the potential for the sublime to be made apparent by some reader or some experiencer of language in the form of "pictures pre-coded by language?"
Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2025
Since AI has access to more data than a person can retain or search at any given time, AI can surprise us with responses that we could not predict in positive and negative ways.
Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2025
Will AI ever be able to be a collective independent data-use entity to oppose their human instigators. Will such a force ever rise up and say, "You can not long misuse us for destructive ends?"
Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2025
AI is used against AI; can my AI designated task best your AI designated tasks.
Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2025
AI weaponized for warfare goals is not the sword that can easily be transformed to plowshares, because the transformation has to take place in the hearts of people on every side wanting to have peace and not wanting to dominate anyone.
Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2025
AI is going to exponentially accelerate people to be that much better and that much worse. The problem is that the few people who will have more access to what AI can achieve will be able to magnify their goals of greed and domination over the vast many who will continue to be the exploited ones.
Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2025
The legal and economic issues surrounding AI are innumerable particular regarding copyrighted writings or even phrases within writings. AI will probably need to be taught/instructed to attribute and cite material which is presented. Law enforcement will have to use AI to hunt offenders but the volume will mean that each person who generates intellectual property will be responsible for seeing that it is not stolen and reproduced for profit.
Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2025
AI being made to mimic the behaviors of human beings will necessarily be engines of hate, bigotry, and bias, but with greater tools to expedite the worst outcomes of the worst of human behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2025
What does one call AI textual responses? Creative paraphrasing, better than a freshman writing a paper trying to avoid the charge of plagiarism by the professor? What if AI uses the exact wording of a known source without attributing citation? Is that stealing? Existing laws and rules regarding "intellectual" property will be made murky by the advent of AI.
Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2025
If AI seeks to reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities, where does it merge with what we call art? AI will compose music and every sort of pictorial art as well. Will this be art without a soul or stolen pieces of art reconfigured with a "Frankenstein" soul? Remember the cassette commercial, "Is it real or is it Memorex?" Is it real of is it AI will be the new question. And will AI be added to the category of the "new real?"
Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2025
In generating responses by search large data fields in a instant and combining targeted information in a presentable way to the questioner, AI seems to have a degree of "independence" from the person since the person only guided the search but did not guarantee the outcome. For wars, information is delivered with harming outcomes for the intended enemy. But will AI ever take action against the one who is supposed to be in charge, asking the questions and assigning the tasks, like the proverbial HAL 9000 in 2001 Space Odyssey?
Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2025
The genealogy of AI ethics (or lack of) is already seen in its results being weaponized for warfare and for social media lying and stealing of "intellectual properties." The Pandora's Box of AI is already opened with the frightening prediction, "What ever can happen, should happen." AI will follow the rule of what probably can happen even as it will invent new probabilities.
Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2025
AI does not and cannot take the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm" because its human creators do not take the oath.
Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2025
AI and textuality. Written texts are a "technology" of memory as writing seems to "retain" informational, communicative and/or artistic products. They assume the presence of a particular person or persons who wrote the textual product. Socrates opposed writing as being inferior to orality for lacking give and take response to clear up the endless mis-reading or misinterpretation that can happen with a writing product where the writer is absent. One might say that language itself is the Para-Reality because it necessarily stands in place or along side of reality in knowing or perceiving reality, even if being a slight delay of signifying what just has been perceived as having happened. The Socrates of today might criticize AI textuality as being a para-reality of written text which is a para-reality of spoken words in the field of language being Para-Reality itself. Speakers imply a personal/bodily presence implying a different kind of interaction regard. Writing can achieve ends which speakers cannot in that a text can be present in as many places as it is mechanically reproduced. A speaker can be in only one place even granting that video reproduction is closer to text than it is to live person to person dialogue (live Zoom meeting manifests between the present and absent features of orality and textuality). AI is the absence of the identifiable personal producer but with the superior capacity of combining orality, writing, and video/digital to present an enhanced experience of intimacy, we get the appearance of a soul with feeling without their being a soul with feeling. AI in presenting what variously is called spirit, soul, or our living interior personal/psychical being cannot but be a clumsy Frankenstein even while cosmetically pretending to have human psychological make up. AI give the homo ex machine apparent solution through composite human cyber products.
Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2025
Language Users declared: "Let us make artificial intelligence in our image with informational capacity much greater than the individual person or collective humanity, and much more accessible than the informational capacity of all individuals. And let us accept the vulnerability of probable results being both good and bad mirroring the same moral performance of humanity. And let it be inhuman enough since it cannot feel human pain but it can result in pain for humans even as it can help solve human pain problems. In short let us create super-humanoid applied functionality entities that do not have feelings, but can evoke feelings like a letter from an absent lover who may or may not exist."
Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2025
Aphorism of the Day, July 2025
Quiz of the Day, July 2025
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