Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2025
Perhaps the psychological correspondence within a different paradigm for oracle is the Jungian notion of synchronicity. Humans can experience a graceful verification of one's place within the vastness of the universe such that one projects a friendly presence as one of the many kinds of seeming intervening presences in one's life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2025
The notion of oracle is an ancient way of designating communication from extra-human sources, as if, a divine finger was highlighting within human accessible experiences some higher source of knowledge and direction for human living.
Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2025
Naïveté in reading the Bible is to assume that the writers did not interpret their life experience even of the divine within their contexts before they wrote. They wrote with interpretation. The many readers of the Bible over the ages have always read with interpretation from their own life experience. The meanings of the biblical words are not "self-evidential," even if words seem to a range of limited meanings that can be understood overtime as access to original context of writing is lost.
Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2025
Every word and phrase of the Bible cannot be regarded to be the final theology of the church, because one cannot avoid the fact that words are interpreted as they are written and when translated and further interpreted in many ways by readers who cannot help but be "writerly readers" per Roland Barthes. Readers are always "writerly readers" because they cannot avoid reading through the filters of their own individual life experience. Creeds, dogma, and theology should be regarded as communal algorithms for how a particular community chooses to read the Bible and inculcate the proposed values of their community for rules of living.
Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2025
The Bible is a collection of writings over many years which through various forms of community consensus became normative for various Christian and Jewish communities and "word of God" became a value term for promulgating the significant singular status which the Bible came to have in respective religious communities.
Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2025
In a world of nepotism and legacy privilege, we often hear the privileged scream unfair when efforts are made to give people not born in privilege get a chance to succeed. They scream, "life should be lived according to merit manifest by the individual," even as they know that their "merit" has been given to them by the place of their birth and by the safety nets which have rescued them from their many failures. Merit cannot be a valid argument unless all persons are given equal training to be those who obtain the status of meriting position. The notion of "merit" cannot be viewed apart from social context.
Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2025
Biblical writings are motivated by leaders in various times promoting community identity ideology about which they are persuaded and therefore want to persuade others to be like-minded. People are simultaneously ego-centric and ethno-centric regarding their views, even for sincere reasons for wanting to share what is perceived as beneficial to one's well-being with their "entire world." Of course such "beneficial sharing" can become coercive and defensive chauvinism if "one's privileged pearls" are trampled on by those who "obviously can't understand because they don't have the "Spirit,"" that is they don't have the same persuasive insight that I have. When people are not persuaded by the same insight, it is quite easy to move to the dichotomy of right or wrong, good or bad, inspired or ignorant. This is why it is beneficial for living together in a multicultural world, it is vital to look for common good human regard practices which can be shared beyond religious confessional communities.
Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2025
Even though human beings have biological restraints and limitations, they have the kind of freedom which is hard to make hard and fast rules to govern every detail of their lives. Trying to take the law of science approach to human behavior does not work because even though there might be a limited range of human behaviors, the ability to predict precisely the timing of those behaviors is not as easy as knowing when water will boil.
Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2025
The central feature of anthropomorphism is being distinctly human because we are language users using language to know that we are language users designating ourselves through language as persons because with language we define persons as relational beings, and since we are constrained by language as a personal medium, we poetically impute personality to everything that gets named by language users. And if God is the trope of ALWAYS MORE and ALL, then God to be such a trope would also have to be designated through language to be a person, even the greatest Person. Language users cannot escape poetic license, since we cannot avoid using tropes that refer to the ALWAYS MORE and ALL. Such tropes have functionally meaning without being able to be empirically verified or falsified. Falsification and Verification are merely functional methods within the ALL, of things being and becoming. From the action of becoming, we abstract Being, and Having Been.
Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2025
To profess "final knowledge" or a theory of everything is a bit presumptuous, and because we have very limited knowledge, it is presumptuous to speak about total knowledge or even a universe. It perhaps is more appropriate to simple admit that we have contextual adequate information for the tasks of living for our particular contexts, even while admitting the reality of there always be More which can continual change our understanding of what adequate knowledge means for us.
Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2025
In the rigidity of legalism, one finds that laws tend to be very contextual and often are made and promulgated to protect those who are wealthiest in a society, even while those who are wealthiest have means to avoid being subject to the law. Equal under the law loses its meaning when some have the wealth to delay endlessly through legal representation while the poor get immediate penalty without adequate representation.
Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2025
Ethics and Morals are about the art of living, not the science of causation. We are impressed by registering causation in the natural order, so impressed that we would hope that such exact causation could be transferred to the art of living together. The art of living together presents too many "exceptions" and the art of living involves having the wisdom to know when the exception is the preferred choice. It is very good and normal for parents to get rest, their recommended "eight hours," but the exception occurs when infants need to be cared for in unplanned and exigent occasions.
Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2025
Laws and rules are parallel to the attempt of taking the commonsense observations and the statistical approximate laws of science and apply them to human behavior. Human behaviors, and human happens are not like the consistency of when water will boil; they have a randomness about them which do not submit to laws, unless one has the law of exception to deal with the unexpected. As a matter of practice, we will not work on Sundays, but the law of love trumps such a law if someone is injured or harmed and requires the work of care. Human laws have to include the law of exceptions happen because of exigent circumstances. We don't like emergencies but because we know that they happen, we have to have laws of emergencies behaviors.
Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2025
Life is about having regular rules for living while allowing for necessary humane exception. So laws and exceptions to the same can go hand in hand. It is good to have a designated day of rest but we still want first responders and medical personnel to work on our day of rest for the humane benefit of needy persons which on any given Sunday might be any of us. The laws of probable occurrences is often at odds with our laws of schedule rest, even "religious" days.
Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2025
Is the experience of the sublime accidental, random, serendipitous, always predictable, or programable? Does one interpret the sublime using the at-hand symbolic framework wherein the experience happens? Can one's bodily health be the accidental reason for looking for some other reason for "feeling so well?" Is the cause for euphoria always so simple to understand? Is it as simple as I feel good when I "win," and I feel poorly when I "lose?" Or is it vastly more complex and unknowable in full but having relevant associative insights conforming to the human need for assigning meaning?
Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2025
The historical rise of Mary in mythical status and the fact that she seems to have more occasions of her return known as her apparitions is significant in perhaps being a feminine corrective to the dominance of masculine "divine" emanations.
Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2025
Resurrection is the ancient science fiction of re-cloning at the sub-molecular level of a new being of a person into that persons continuing identity in the realm of the invisible.
Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2025
The seeming contradictory Christ-sayings, "Peace be with you," and "I did not come to bring peace but division," indicates that peace can be understood as community consensus and agreement or it can be understood as underneath contemplative peace no matter what is happening on the surface.
Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2025
The redefinition of truth from the classical notions of invisible "goes without saying accepted common knowledge," about the divine, philosophical necessary truths, and tautological definitional and mathematical truths, happens in the Enlightenment when truth become more that which can be empirically verified and in line with agreed upon eye-witness reporting, and scientific laws. The older totalizing truths perhaps have been relegated to feeling truths, intuitive truths, which pertain to the "truth" of aesthetic experience or the truth of the subjective experience.
Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2025
To say biblical meanings are stable and final and self-evidential is to deny their changing relationships to people living in time where meanings are always in flux due to stages of life and changing life circumstances. To say meanings are stable and final is to deny the reality of time.
Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2025
One of the ways to account for division within the religious communities of the first century is to present Jesus as being a divisive figure. I did not come to bring peace. Members of a household will be divided against each other. There is strange comfort in adjusting to the reality of division if one has the leader of one's own side of the division not saying, "they will come together over me," but they will be divided because of me. All too human reality comes to text in the Gospel; all too human reality in text is actually divinely revealed if one finds it to be a poignant insight.
Aphorism of the Day, August 10, 2025
While most don't literalize the utopian visions of Isaiah about the wolf and lamb becoming friends; many still literalize the apocalyptic as predictive of future events. The Apocalyptic is of a similar discourse as the utopian. Both are discourses which serve people who need a vision of better life for all with harmony and justice as a way of surviving and refusing to normalize oppression which is so "loud" in their lives that it can purport to be the "truth" of life.
Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2025
The apocalyptic functioned as visionary hope which involved a radical discontinuity in suffering situations. A new and different heaven and earth would interdict the situation of pain soon, and this vision gave comfort for those who had to live with the suffering.
Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2025
Hope is a visionary extrapolation from our assessment now of the traces of our lives of what we might think would be ideal or better for us in our future. Hope can suffer from our faulty assessment facility because we can be too coded by the imperfections of our present life to even know what would be best for us? Although hope usually assumes a utopia rather than a dystopia, in practice it can be perceptually guided by selfish self-interest. It can be what I think is best for me without regard to what is best for the common good. When we over identify self-interest with common good, others may and do suffer.
Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2025
The Shadow Sublime might be called the high that people or groups get from hurting others through physical harm or verbal demeaning assaults. That such could be "peak" experiences/entertainment for people reveals the frightening versatility of the human psyche. It occurs in mob or crowd behaviors and so it provides individual absolution of guilt for a horrible thing to be done. In fact, it can also rationalize the horrendous as righteous indignation.
Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2025
Every era has the social phenomena of what might be called the Shadow Sublime, which has many forms of people getting "high" from negative appraised ideas and behaviors, which depart from acceptable legal and social standards. The "high" which come from deep-seated conspiracy theories characterize the thrill of being an exclusively privileged one with special knowledge of the cause of social and political events. The Shadow Sublime can occur because one is so over-whelmed by the actual complexity of life that the exclusive special knowledge gives one the "high" of having the experience of "being in control" because one has this inside knowledge. It is an individual and social pathology that functions as an adjustment technique because actual mystery if a threat. The certitude of such insider knowledge can result in acting out behaviors which are anti-social in nature.
Aphorism of the August 5, 2025
Having potential and not doing any work brings about a life of regretful might have beens. Having dreams without doing anything about them limits dreaming to a narcotic function. Having hope without faith leaves one's life in perpetual atrophy.
Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2025
What is the relationship between faith and hope? They both are about the future. Hope is the vision of a better future; faith is acting now being persuaded about the immediate action toward that better future.
Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2025
We have passed from the classical age of the general acceptance of words containing assumed self-evidential meanings immediately knowable by all, to the modern era of words being the human products which have origin and history within context, to the post-modern era where everything is but an interpretation of other interpretations. Some people still try to live in classical and modern ways akin to an Amish buggy on a super highway.
Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2025
Living is the art of the continual borrowing of existing traces of what we know has been and rearranging those traces with and within current human production to be traces for doing the same in future occasions. Most of this done with seeming automatic redundancy memories without conscious regard of intending to do something "new."
Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2025
How about starting an addiction recovery group called Greed Anonymous? This was suggested by Ralph Nader many years ago. Probably won't happen because greedy people are probably the last to come to an end of themselves and seek help and because they can dispense small band aid charity for tax breaks, they can convince themselves that their idolatry is really salutary.
