Biblical justice often seems to be justice delayed into the afterlife, because rarely while they live the mighty are not cast from their thrones, and the rich are not sent away empty, unless one is referring to what happens at death or one spiritualizes the superiority of the thrones of "virtue" and the treasures of the "heart." Perhaps the Bible is mainly about revaluing the spiritual over the physical as a way of saying the poor truly can have an advantage?
Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2025
Ever notice that the people of the Bible and people of most of history is about the tyranny of the greedy powerful wealthy dominating in various ways the poorer general populace. Democracies are supposed to be systems where the populace at least through representative governments have power to exact some controls on behalf of the common good, but increasingly oligarchs have been able to pay off the "elective" representatives to their own advantage and to the diminished services for the masses.
Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2025
The words attributed to Jesus, "Be on your guards against all kinds of greed..." Avarice has been designated as one of the deadly sins. In the economic system of capitalism, greed would be the pejorative for self-interest, which is regarded to be a positive driver of economic healthiness for a "free" market. It is based upon a idealistic reciprocity of suppliers and those who buy. In operation though, the self-interest of a few get magnified over the self-interest of the many and when a few own the majority of the world wealth capitalism becomes oligarchy.
Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2025
For skeptics and fundamentalists, what is the purpose of taking modern historical methodology and scientific thinking and applying them to the Bible as though they were relevant modes of epistemology during ancient times. They end up supporting or criticizing Bible based upon their anachronistic importing of modernity into antiquity. Historical evidence shows that the Bible is a collection of writings which evolved in its compilation over many years within many different communities. The Bible is a written language tradition which has been interpreted in many ways and in many times by many different communities, and it has been interpreted differently even with contradictions in assumed meanings. It has divided readers and united readers because written texts do not have self evidential meanings automatically agreed upon by everyone. It has and can be used as origin discourse for wide varieties of communal beliefs and practices, and the practices of ancient communities regarding polygamy, subjugation of women, and slavery are now judged by "modern" standards as unjust, unloving and demeaning human behaviors. As the official "textbook" designation as the "Word of God," such does not mean that we believe God upholds slavery, or other ancient practices regarded now to be unjust; "Word of God" means more that the ultimate nature of God as love and justice is always looking for a hearing within human community and the Bible is a collection of writing of previous attempts of people to bring these attempts and in their imperfect human contexts to written text. We in our imperfect efforts attempt to bring words of God as love and justice into our lives and we are doing it with varying levels of success while being plagued with our own failures, just as biblical people were. The Bible is proof that the "word of God" was not fully successful in making love and justice a reality for biblical people, and the "Word of God" awaits further events instantiation in our own time. The Bible is proof that people are forever "unfinished," even in their understandings of God.
Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2025
The presumption that any society today can limit itself to biblical insights with the assumption that biblical knowledge is omni-competent to all questions for all times is both naive and untrue. However, universal insights about the need for love and justice, found in biblical writing, to be continually reapplied in new life circumstances will always be relevant. Using relevant biblical insights in relevant applicable ways is the issue. So, Paul's exhortation for slaves to be content with their circumstances, is not relevant today, but repugnant.
Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2025
AI is the vacuuming of all human data and being re-cycled with new digital outputs for new situations making all traces of the past mostly anonymous or lacking current attribution.
Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2025
Prayer is the acknowledgment of life as relational; we live and move and have being within everything that has been and is as preparation to what will be. Coming to language the relational aspect of life is prayer in its various forms in spoken and written language, in it corporate and private closet settings, and in its telling validation in the oblationary body language of deeds living out our highest values of love and justice in and toward life itself.
Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2025
Living is about leaning how to survive within a sea of probable happenings by observing consistent repetitions and building one's own repetitions to deal with the repetitions which one observes happening to oneself. Within the dynamics of my repetitions encountering how I interpret how I understand external repetitions confronting me, the new can arise with the possibility neo-logical invention combining past traces with something new, which at first might seem as something as a Pan, goat-man new species until it became a culturally integrated staple that has lost its new weirdness.
Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2025
God's "weakness" is our weakness in that God's very nature of being creative freedom with a degree of that freedom shared within everything, means that to honor that freedom, it is not over-ridden by the divine as a monolithic coercive intervener. God must within omnipresence be an internal lure toward the highest moral and spiritual expressions of freedom, namely, acting in love and justice. We as limited agents of freedom are confronted with our own weakness when challenged by the freedom of environment and interior forces to confront us with agents which are often impersonally or randomly bad or personally evil. With God, we must freely choose to overcome evil and badness with good choices.
Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2025
What has arisen in language traditions, whether regarded as science, mathematics, religion, or art, is the manifold human effort to deal with the universe as a generating system of probabilities, requiring human agents to generate new probabilities within all other agents of probabilities which share a proportionately lesser freedom compared to the all-inclusive freedom of this great generator of all probabilities, always on its way to throw and land the dice of actual happenings, with slight but significant help from the dice themselves.
Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2025
Prayer is more relational than transactional. A transaction is "I ask God for what I think I need and want, and it does or does not happen." Relational prayer is more about preparational comportment of oneself to way that things are for oneself in one's situation so as to be able to be insightful about how to be an interactional agent in one's circumstance to promote the highest of love and justice required by a most high Being whose nature respects the freedom of all kinds of agencies in the field of probabilities which comprises a universe in process at any moment.
Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2025
To live in a child like way in returning to the mode of wonder as an adult means the ability for realizing every moment is new, and one can leave the boredom of the redundant of what is habitual and seemingly programmed and be thankful that an integrated past prepares one to take on the new, to make the serendipitous unserendipitously common.
Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2025
Deconstruction of any proposition resides in the constant dissolving of meaning which occurs within concentric circles of the viewing contexts. Another reading from another context changes the meaning of any proposition, or at least destabilizes any fixed meaning even while for pragmatic functions of meaning within certain communal use a proposition retains a degree of communal objectivity since the community using the terms of the proposition are pre-coded with tacit meaning which has them seemingly agreeing on surface functional meaning. Perceptually for many years the sun seemed to rise and set on a "flat earth," and the flat earth was deconstructed with knowledge which put in question the mere perception of a flat earth.
Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2025
New Testament writers represent their readings of the Hebrew Scriptures mostly from the Greek translation of it, as insightful in presenting comparative presentations of the figure of Jesus and the mission of the early followers of Jesus. To say that history repeats itself or that past characterizations of events predict in exact ways the future events are historical interpretations and are consistent with how we line up and compare present events with the record of past events, but the methods are arbitrary even with a method of saying "this current events looks like or contains some of the same elements as the past recorded events." That Babe Ruth set a home run record did not predict that Hank Aaron would break it; it only changed the definition of record to be possibly broken in the future. The sameness in "subject matter" of past recorded events do not share specific causal relationship with present events except the general observation that all the past has caused all of the present and we cannot align exactly all correspondence with events of the past with events of the present in precisely cause and effect connected ways.
Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2025
The writings of the Bible in a collection juxtapose so much human experience data over such a long period of time that it is a disservice to force upon it false unities and harmonies which are obviously not there at the time when the writers are writing, even if one takes the view that the last writer is first or primary in having the latest interpretive perspective on previous writings. One should be honest that one is using a particular interpretation for the dogmatic concerns of one's own confessional community. One's prior commitments to one's own community values is the telling feature of biblical interpretation, even for secular historians who follows their persuasion about the "science" of historical studies.
Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2025
Every event in time is a "unique" occasions even as each events is characterized as similar or different from the traces of what has happened before. Christian apologists resort to making the events in the life of Jesus which would defy the principle of natural causes as exemplary of the naturally impossible unique occasion which supports the supernatural nature of Jesus. In doing so they are upholding the naturalness/normality of the scientific view of common sense reality. That Jesus performed uncommon reality is what makes him unique. Mythicists such as Joseph Campbell would find such discourse as totally in keeping with similar literature about heroes and the gods/goddesses. Mythicists would oppose trying to force mythical truth into the discourse of empirical verification. One could say that in the secular realm cinema and hypertextual computer generated imagery has taken over the former functions of the hero/gods discourse including even the apocalyptic genre which was so evident in peoples with vision of world doom because of profound immanent and local suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2025
Science has brought about the reduction of the vague general use of head and mind as the location of thinking to the physical source of thinking in the body organ, the brain. It is interesting that feeling has been said to reside in the heart even while to manipulate feelings we use drugs to trigger places within the brain to make us "feel" better. A question might arise though: Is mind and thinking mysteriously decentralized in functional degrees throughout the entire body? I don't think anyone but a wacky poet would say, "I think with my toes." Can total life within the body really be divided up into but "partial" functions, like thinking, or is life in the human body so interconnected that life is "everything within the body, all at once?" We fragment for analytical purposes, even for healing purposes of seemingly localized parts, even while the totality of life within the human body remains total.
Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2025
Everyday tasks are necessary for the maintenance of our lives, for eating, for taking care of the required hospitality for people in our lives. We still need insight as to when to break our schedules for receiving the next creative advance in our lives. Taking the time for contemplation may interrupt a cherished schedule but resisting can be a choice not to move on to the next paradigm shift in the understanding of our lives.
Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2025
Language ability is like a virus we are infected with because our human bodies include the perfect environment for language virus to live and grow and take over our lives with the results of language traditions which program us to our connection with our outer environments. We live and move in our language traditions which re-infect new language users even as language traditions evolve and change with new paradigms with new meanings in new times. With language, we are always developing new ways to interact with our world. With language, the language-oid also occurs like the paralinguistic phenomena of music, mathematics, and myth-making which merges the dream world with the language of the outer world.
Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2025
Parables are like every metaphor; they give flashing perspectival insights based upon some common shared perspectives even biases. The parable of the Good Samaritan does not mean that all Samaritans are good neighbors or that all priests and Levites are bad neighbors. It means sometimes those we expect to be good neighbors aren't and those whom we don't expect to be good neighbors are.
Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2025
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a provocative wisdom story requiring the redefinition of the term neighbor as both a person encountered but more importantly the active person in performing deeds of love, mercy, and justice.
Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2025
Fear of the other with "differences" can be the motivation for people to act in unneighborly ways. Strategies of exposure to and appreciation of differences are needed to promote mutual neighborliness.
Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2025
The communal study of the Bible requires the use of massive reductive abbreviations, like using names for the Gospels. There are no autographs of the Gospel with internal attributions of authorship, so for communication purposes we use traditional titles like, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, when what we really mean is a title for a piece of writing of which the earliest full copy of such writing is only in the fourth century. Sometimes we can act as though the titles actually designate a Matthew, a Mark, a Luke, and a John with stylus in hand. We think that we can be more certain about the letters of Paul but we cannot know precisely what editing and redacting took place in communities before we have the "canonical copies." For example, we have reconstructions of Marcion's Paul in around 140 C.E. which is quite different from the canonical Pauline letters.
Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2025
With the growth of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, becoming like a masked secret police, we can wonder whether we are entering the banality of evil phase in the normalization of not loving our neighbor as ourselves because we allow people in power to designate certain people so "other" than us that they don't deserve to be worthy to be a neighbor to love.
Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2025
The message of rebuke in the parable of the Good Samaritan is that we can find good religious reasons and arguments of inconvenience for not being good active neighbors. Living, moving, and having being within God means that a priori we are all geographically passive neighbors and the moral question is are we acting with neighborly care?
Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2025
Human being can act and present outer feelings and empathy when inside they might feel the opposite. AI deep fakes allow such acting something like emotional ventriloquism, but with a much more verisimilitude than the proverbial ventriloquist manipulating a lever up the back side of a less than life like puppet moving the "dummy's" lips. AI deep fake dummies has appearances so precise as to fool the beholder.
Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2025
Everything said and written is like the foreground which rest upon the background of what is not said and written. Motives and intentions motive the foregrounding of somethings and not others.
Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2025
The prophets were those who rebuked the nation for leaving or not performing their best founding principles. America needs prophets who rebuke us for leaving our better angels when greed, grift, and corruption in high places for the benefit of the few is rampant.
Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2025
Our lives today are data-ized. We are categorized by collected information about us so that we can be citizen with proclivities for political ideologies and consumers for products. We work for people who use statistics for business efficiency and we make data out of other people even as we ourselves are data. The truth of our data culture is that we allow actuarial wisdom to be betrayed and not followed if it counters higher profits in certain sectors, e.g., fossil fuels and climate change, proliferation of guns and death statistics, lack of universal health care and poor health outcomes. The end result of data control seems to be for the extreme profit of the few. Would that in our data-ization we actually implemented true actuarial wisdom.
Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2025
Religion purport to be holistic systems of health. In time the meaning of "holistic" has changed as when modern medicine has resulted in a a different understand between mind and body. Any religious perspective which claims to be holistic needs to integrate what is continuously happening in science without pitting religious "art of living" language with the scientific method.
Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2025
If Jesus had 70 or 72 evangelists and 12 disciples in just three years of ministry, he must have been quite a busy teacher. That would be quite a "crash" course of theology. No dissertations to read but lots of oral exams.
