Temporary heroic faith or accidental faith might be contrasted with "mustard seed" faith which involves the accumulation of consistent acts of being faithful into the character of being faithful. Character is when faith has taken over the entire person as a quality of life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2025
In life the greatest things are not universally experienced or even widely spread, like freedom from sickness and disease, freedom from dying, world peace, world wealth being equally shared by everyone, et. al. In the probability field of what might happen the luck and misfortune might seem randomly spread even though the persons with the most wealth and power tend to have a greater control in amassing things which they actually can control. Religion provides people with a sense of being universal and eternal when in fact we are very local and very temporal and such gives us an inflated sense of personal and communal meaning in the face of our actual smallness and our vulnerability to what probably will happen.
Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2025
The biblical writers used visualization of the afterlife for motivating corrections for behaviors in this life.
Aphorism of the Day,September 27, 2025
We are always living outside of language because language only is used to signify what is not language. The problem is that when we try to speak about what is outside of language we end up using language to do so.
Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2025
The Christian faith is really what has come to language in the many traces that we have and when there are not autograph documents about Jesus and no certainty about specific provenance of any writings what has prevailed is the reality of almost as many versions to Christianity as there are confessing Christians. Even people who think that they agree about their faith specifics cannot be certain because no two minds are the same in how they have been constituted by their language experience. This is further problematized by the vast use of metaphors found in biblical writings which are subjectively appropriated in their meanings in many different ways, which for more sanguine interpreters should be the humble confession, "I don't know what the biblical writer was really trying to say."
Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2025
Life is about what has come to language.
Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2025
A baseline for all axiology, including science, art, religion, and the quotidian, might be simply what comes to language in products like speech acts, writing, sound, body language acts, and the interpretation of visual events when they too come to language by being "named" or identified, or communicated. While Longinus wrote about the Sublime becoming found within the text, one could expand this notion of the Sublime coming to "textuality" of all human experience. The Sublime is an experiential marker both social and individual which in turns sets the value of human experience. The Sublime as a confession of one who who experiences noticeable awe from an occurrence has a hierarchy of value set. The sublime can occur on the continuum of everything which can come to language within the many areas of life which is really undifferentiated Life categorized into things like the experience of science, art, religion, the every day mundane et. al. The Sublime occurs and values get set based upon how an individual or society process the event of the Sublime. The Sublime has various "intensities" for people in very individual ways particularly the one's which purport to be socially shared experiences.
Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2025
Would that practitioners of all discourses would acknowledge that in existence, everything which comes to language and in all attending manifestation, has linguistic existence having entered some human language tradition. Life is about sorting out what has come to language giving appropriate discursive usefulness to the many areas of life which govern the ways in which the various language games of humanity are played. Science, religion, and aesthetics play different language games which have their own appropriate meaningful truth statuses. No need to pit them against each other unless one tries to be proverbially in a chess game playing by checker game rules. Each should stay within their own game rules realizing that the "meta" is language itself.
Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2025
The afterlife is some place that one cannot be until one enters it. Since it is a mystery it is the ideal topic of visualization, and religions have been built both comforting and threatening visualization on the great mystery of the afterlife.
Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2025
Interpreting the apocalyptic genre in Scripture and other places should not be a reference to the last day of life on earth but should be understood as the latest day on earth of people who are under stress and oppression visualizing hopeful immediate outcomes.
Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2025
Serving God or wealth may require a sublimation of desire. Desire of the energy of life over focused upon people or things can become idolatry or addiction. Its intensity needs to be directed toward "no thing" and "no person" as the contemplation of worship. Such exercise may give one the ability to enjoy and use things without addiction or idolatry. God as the always beyond context should give us the ability of contextual priority for good stewardship habits.
Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2025
There are as many views of what wealth means in the Bible as their are of interpreters of the various places where references to wealth occur, even contradictory responses to it. A monk believes the words of Jesus requires a vow of poverty while others regard wealth to be the actual blessing of God upon one's life. There are a variety of relationships to wealth articulated in the Bible.
Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2025
Is capitalism the worship of wealth, a system to serve wealth rather than God? Probably for some people, especially for those who are successful at greed. Wealth is the goal in life for some. Capitalism makes the erection of golden calf idols into a vital practice of supply and demand chains based upon viewing the human subject as an engine of desire who needs products.
Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2025
What is the mathematical insight about not being able to serve God and wealth? In Math terms: God > Wealth, there wealth is not worshipful since it is much less than what we would define as the greatest, however, one might want to conceive of the greatest.
Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2025
In temporo-provincial-centrism, persons of any era want to claim ultimate and final truth status for their uniquely discovered insights. However, in the morning yesterday's truth was only yesterday's latest truth; today involves the amassing of more occasions of generated language products which re-shuffles yesterday's truth in a different way with a different perspective. Today's final truth is only the latest pronouncement of arrogance of making my telephone booth the universe of all truth.
Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2025
The perception of the success of sin and greed in a parable of Jesus had him wishing out loud about a similar success for the children of light in doing good with the same passion.
Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2025
The past as a continuously moving date is continuing proof that we have survived and that the world has survived is too general to specify how the world has survived and the specific conditions of the various entities of those who have survived. Does death mean that whoever and whatever has been did not survive? Or with word tricks do we say that all of the past is constitutive of what is and what will be and remains continuous in what is in invisible ways. How is it wise to try to pretend to subtract what has been from what is and what will be? How does the past remain present and in the future? How does time accumulate all past experience when the apparent changes of the state of material existence is empirically proved?
Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2025
Without community, subjectivism can easily be egocentrism. My view is not the only view and while I am a prisoner of my unique view, it behooves me to know that my subjectivism has been coded by my communities and my subjectivism involves my freedom in choosing to learn from and take on in influential ways, the views of others.
Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2025
Faith is a time-based experience of being persuaded about one's preferred highest values and should be accompanied with the humility that such values have not always been held in completely consistent ways or in the ways that future notions have come to falsify. One may be persuaded about the excellence of Jesus while admitting that he in his time did not express the enlighten views on slavery which we have come to regard as common love and justice. One may be persuaded about Thomas Jefferson's insights on justice while noting that his practice of slavery made him quite a hypocrite about equality of people created in God's image.
Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2025
The paucity of writing and literacy meant that writers and writing of the ancient world were much rarer than writing and literacy in the modern world, and one could say that they have over-valued treatment because of their rarity. Ancient writing today gets diluted in its value because it has become like a sugar cube dissolving in an ocean of all language products.
Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2025
What is basic about human identity is that we are language users knowing ourselves as such who are born into traditions of language use which constitute the paradigms of our self understanding within linguistic contexts.
Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2025
With the Enlightenment and the advances in modern science and statistical probability theory, for many apologists for theological credibility, began to understand theology in anthropological sound ways, beginning with the obvious admission that all experiences of the divine were human experiences. This meant that the divine became the human way to characterize the uncanny, shared experiences of the sublime with communal interpretations of the same, and the retaining of wonder in the face of prideful humanism which can become a forgetting about how small we actually are in the face of plenitude.
Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2025
Why is it foolish as the Psalmist wrote, to say there is no God? It would be definitionally meaningless to say that there is no greatness beyond any human experience of a plenitude greater than human experience. One can argue about the nature of the greatest plenitude in time but it would be foolish to deny it.
Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2025
The words of the Psalms are words to use to cope with life situations in the ecstasy, their agony, and sheer mundaneness of drudgery. They can be used to parallel the running words in one's own mind that are always happening even if one does not recognize that they are happening as one's own hymn to cope with life.
Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2025
Philosophers can be those who are making the observation about everything happening all at once, including that real time observation, while those with less examined epistemology, act pragmatically in the moment for their own immediate material needs, living the meaning of I act, therefore I am (acting).
Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2025
It may be more insightful to consider that books of the New Testament derive from "schools" of thoughts or something like a "rabbinic" circles. These various schools derived from people with the literacy to speak, write, and teach. They may have had direct or indirect access to the various schools of about Jesus and his oral traditions and they collaborated in ways which ended up with writings which are like most academic topics among interested parties; they agree, they offer what they think are corrected views, they disagree, they add traditions and in the existing writing styles specific to their own experience, and they write for their particular school of students seeking to communicate what they thought their students needed to be brought to faithful discipleship.
Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2025
The New Testament is writing within the "slave mentality" of the Roman Empire, even to the point of the word slave, "doulos" becoming a metaphor for one's relationship to God and Christ. Neither Jesus nor Paul opposed the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the Roman Empire. They were "slaves" to the social practices of their time even if they promoted a love ethic for both slaves and their owners.
Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2025
A range of interpretations regarding the hard sayings of Jesus about hating one's own family members can be considered, from a completely ironic reading whereby one might note that the intonation of orality is lost in the textual version. In the ironic reading the implication would be "if you really think that following me is bad for you and your family, then don't do it." Another possible meaning would be apocalyptic imminency requiring the avoiding of settling in and having a "normal" family situation. One would be loathe of family life if the world is going to end.
Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2025
The words of Jesus about hating one's family members as a requirement to be a disciple contrasted with his words to love one's enemies seems to present extreme contextual differential interpretive nuance. The proverbial Pharisees, Sadducees who are perhaps presented as foes in the Gospel would also be enemies to love, as well as the Romans and conspirators who are presented as those who brought Jesus to death. Gospel pericopes need to be read with irony and appreciation for a range of contextual meanings because we cannot know the specific meaning of the writing occasion. One contextual reality that preceded Jesus and has continued within the Christian tradition is a brand of apocalypticism which often includes life denying, family denying values since one is living in preparation for not being here.
Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2025
This has happened in this way. I have come to accept what has happened. I now write about my past heroes and present them as those who knew the future as present. It gives me a sense of God's control of chaos to say that someone in the past knew that it would happen. The above is how much of the Bible is penned.
