Aphorism of the Day, December 2024

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2024

Atheists are those who wish that billions of people hadn't confessed and shouldn't confess within certain communities with language traditions of the Sublime, the uncanny human experience with the name of God being designated for such a superlative experience.  ALL exists for everyone; an atheist is one who does not want to project certain human superlatives of theisms upon ALL.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2024

A story theme of the Bible is that special people had to have special birth events.  This satisfies the predestination to greatness trope.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2024

People usually decry the "utopian" because of its impossibility of happening due to the violation of natural laws.  The presentation of an uncanny future transformation of things is but an exaggeration to highlight the lure of the direction of perfection.

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2024

Thinking about the future is always "utopian," in being no such time, or place, with no such conditions.  But we always live toward such myth.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2024

In our lives we live by the "illusion" of the utopian, i.e., no such perfect place with no such perfect people.  Hope is the perpetual creation of what is not yet and will not ever be within our worded lives.  When the actual comes to pass, and happens it has used hope's utopian illusion as a target.  The religious violation of hope is to pretend that hope's utopian illusions will be or have been actual in telling what has happened.  At the same time, imagination about the past, present, and future is valid human endeavor for inventiveness of all sorts, even if but for entertainment purposes in a life which needs can always use uncanny motivations.

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2024

One can understand the conditions of living within genuine freedom of what can probably happen as the life of being in a perpetual ordeal.  Even being in states of apparent ease and comfort are challenges to our freedom, because in such states of well-being we have the challenge to help alleviate the suffering of those not in ease.  To be baptized with fire is to live in the conditions of the ordeal.  Accepting that about life helps one be honest that we always already live in the age of the suffering servant Messiah.  Get used to it.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2024

The Apocalyptic is the generalization of one pondering one's own eventual death upon everyone else in hope that a higher power will give new beginnings which ameliorate suffering and pain and injustice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2024

It is easy to call biblical religions the future of illusion since so much of the writings are "utopian," i.e., no such place and no such angelic persons inhabiting them.  We cannot deny the function of the utopian though for establishing the direction of our moral aspirations.  To call America a "light on the hill," is also such utopian language impelling us to be our better angels.  Our world cannot escape the human propensity of the "illusion of utopian vision" because no one escapes a vision of how one might be better.  The shadow of this hope is that many think that they can be better through greed, lying, and oppressing others.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2024

The New Testament was written by people who found a way to rejoice when they did not always have the ideal conditions to do so.  They learned to rejoice when they had no social or political power.  Today many believe that rejoicing should happen because we have political power and conditions of ease when we should be working to enable the dispossessed to have reasons to rejoice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2024

One needs to be honest that the notion of messianism was diverse and developing in the New Testament and the communities which generated the writings.  The presentations of the Messiah reflected the needs and situations of the communities which were writing and preaching about Jesus, all of which happened into the second century when in fact the world had not yet ended with an apocalyptic event.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2024

The "under the radar" of the Roman Empire success of the Jesus Movement resulted in the defining of the current reality of the Messiah being a Risen Christ figure presiding as king of an interior kingdom discovered by those who were "baptized" by the Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2024

The writing of history is more about the time when the writing is done than about the period studied in the writing.  Why?  In writing history, we ask and frame the question according to our current interest about what we think is important about the past because we already know what has happened between now and then.  So the Gospels written decades after Jesus are mainly about the conditions of the the writers in those decades than they are about the conditions which Jesus actually faced in his situation.  Everything about the presentation of Jesus is edited and redacted according to the needs of the writers and the writers' readers/listeners.  Writers do not write into a past vacuum; they write to a living audience.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2024

When describing the significance of the lives of Jesus and John the Baptist, the writers of the Gospels, particularly the synoptics were obliged for matters of rhetorical authority to use phrases from the Hebrew Scriptures, meaning that their lives had precedence in message and intent within the Judaic tradition.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2024

The person who forgets that he or she is using language, uses language while doing such forgetting.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2024

Santa Claus is the end result of a most radically altered saint in history.  How did this fourth century bishop morph into the totally secular children's saint to be Santa Claus from the North Pole using a sleigh with reindeer to deliver Christmas Eve gifts to children?  We can go bah humbug on this seeming commercial exploitation of children, or we can accept that the Christ Child and Nicholas of Myra roll through history with manifold collateral effects, including helping some businesses stay in the black because of excessive end of the year spending.

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2024

John the Baptist was a perpetual faster while Jesus was accused of being a drunkard, a glutton, and one who ate with sinners.  The fasting of Jesus might be describe as being in the world but not "of" the world, or his perfection in being moderate in all manner of impulse control.  John the Baptist with his extreme asceticism and wilderness isolation might be said to be "not in the world," and not "of" the world.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2024

Long before intermittent fasting became a dieting trend, such fasting has been a part of a spiritual rule of life for holistic living.  John the Baptist with his ascetic lifestyle is perhaps a chief model for the "fasting" lifestyle.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2024

Latest or end times are attempts to put a book end upon Continuity.  It can't be actually done but we need telling beginnings and endings to tell the stories which give us identity in our contexts from which we project our stories upon Continuity.

Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2024

The Gospels piggyback John the Baptist and Jesus.  Their story is told together and one can only assume motives and purposes for coupled presentation.  It must be that the two movements, of John and Jesus were inextricably linked.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2024

What does the "end of the world" mean?  That there will no longer be human beings alive to experience a continuing material world?  Or that both human experience of the material world and the material world will be gone?  Does it mean time ends?  Will there no longer be a process in the material world that has continuous before and after occasions?  It might be a better appropriation of "apocalyptic" and "eschaton" by switching the notion of "end" to mean merely the latest.  In the latest occasion, there is always already continuous beginnings and ending occurring with every degree of human experience on the continuum of weal and woe.  In language we try to "stop" time by positing an ever "latest" occasion as if we could convert diachronicity into synchronisticity.  The illusion is to think that structuralism can defeat processual time by "stopping" things from development when the use of language is treated as a "pause" button on time, presuming a "freeze-frame" effect.

 

Aphorism of the Day, October 2024

Aphorism of the Day, October 31, 2024 (Begins All Hallowtide)

To really miss someone after they have passed away.  What is the feeling of "missing someone?"  Is it veneration?  The feeling of deeply missing Jesus after he died surely was the crucible for his post resurrection appearances.  All Hallowtide is like Easter in the fall when we deal with the poignant feelings of missing people whom we have lost to death, both the well known great ones and the local saints in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, October 30, 2024

Living lives having language means that our lives are an always already moving vocation of value assignment.  Words assigns values and the goal of life is be at the work of upgrading our work of value assigning toward what informs the ideal values.  Jesus came to reveal the supreme values and they are succinctly stated as loving God and our neighbors.

Aphorism of the Day, October 29, 2024

Why do laws changes?  Rules continually need to be reapplied in situation with analysis of whether they fulfill the second great commandment, loving ones neighbor as oneself.  Why should former practices of  slavery, subjugation of women, child labor, and the status of LGBTQ+ change?  When the regularized treatment of any person fails the "love your neighbor as yourself" test, the law and regularized practice must be change to comply with the greater principle.

Aphorism of the Day, October 28, 2024

While the Hebrew Scripture can seem to be mostly writings for and on behalf the people of Israel in the many traditions which derive from the same, there are ample teachings therein which qualify as categorical imperatives to be relevant to the lives of everyone, everywhere.

Aphorism of the Day, October 27, 2024

The words which we use are abbreviations which stand in place the realities which we experience.  They are abbreviations because they are reductions which highlights the existence of particular things in contrast to all the others things which they are not.

Aphorism of the Day, October 26, 2024

We might think of today as simply the repetition of things which have occurred before since the Preacher Qoheleth wrote that "there is nothing new under the sun" as supporting the theory of vanity of vanities all is vanity."  The before and after phenomenon of events means that the after is always newer than the before even if the after includes continuity traces of the before.  Apparent newness only becomes evident in time-lapsing assessment of the past when change is revealed from the unnoticed incrementalism of actual experience of time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 25, 2024

It has become evident that the situation of complexity due to the massive proliferation of world knowledge makes the owners of information brokers best capable to manipulate resources of life and if information greedy conglomerates do not care for the common good of the most possible number of individuals, individuals will be but small cogs serving the big owners of information who have the handling capacity.  Religion and politics, and their governing bodies,  should be about using power for the common good.  It is not certain that either will be able to function that way into the future.

Aphorism of the Day, October 24, 2024

We like stories because they are time-lapsed and things falsely happen quickly, in contrast to the patience which is required in the present when "watching grass grow" does not seem so exciting.

Aphorism of the Day, October 23, 2024

In the present, our past lives become but reductive time-lapsed memorial stories, and we continually edit such time-lapsed stories when we chose a memorial photo of a good time or a bad time.  We can change the time-lapsing perspective with editorial choices in the present.

Aphorism of the Day, October 22, 2024

The traces of our memory are always "time lapsed" because we cannot relive actual yesterday time in today's time.

Aphorism of the Day, October 21, 2024

It has to be said repeatedly, that the Bible is to be understood literarily as artistic literature, not literally as scientific verification or eye-witness journalism.  The paucity of written works during ancient times meant that the Bible had to be politics, poetry, myth of origin, instruction, and entertainment, in a very omni-competent way.   Today, our genres are split into many distinct discourses each with their own discursive practices.  While the ancients did not have modern science, they still had common sense and naive realism to distinguish between what can happen in nature and what can't.  When interpreters insist that every human event story in the Bible necessarily conforms to empirical verification, they are offending the biblical writers as those who did not know the difference between common sense and aesthetic presentation of their stories for community identity.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 20, 2024

In the petition of the Serenity Prayer, we ask for courage to be the answers to our own prayers when with wisdom we discern our actual ability to do so.  Sometimes religious humanity is waiting to God to act while God is waiting for humanity to do the justice which is in our power to do.

Aphorism of the Day, October 19, 2024

AI text is Frankenstein text, stolen words from actual people stitched together with intricate probability propriety for a textual event pretending to hide actual personal presence in its product.

Aphorism of the Day, October 18, 2024

Common sense and science are the ways that we live with the future as the continuing field of probabilities.  Actuarial wisdom is based upon observed past experience and living in learned predictive ways with what might happen.  We continually assess in the present the success of our former predicative ways and add the present experience to the new data base for future predicative living.  Americans fail at common sense and actuarial wisdom by politically accepting that the proliferation of the numbers of guns in our society is the legal reality of the second amendment while tolerating the death and harm due to the accessibility of so many guns.

Aphorism of the Day, October 17, 2024

What's the difference between political faith and religious faith?  Political faith has to do with living according to a persuasive system that keeps members of religious communities from hurting each other because of the "final absoluteness" with which they hold their positions.  If one admits that modern life includes people living in close proximity in ideological groups that are quite different and conflicting systems of persuasion, then the legal teeth of a common political persuasion needs to be such as to prevent members with conflicting "absolute systems" from harming each other at worst, and at best promoting a live and let live freedom which protects common good outcomes.  America has to continuously hold to the ideals of this common system of political persuasion from being replaced by sectarian religious communal practice.

Aphorism of the Day, October 16, 2024

What might be the difference between a macroscopic prayer and a microscopic prayer?  God bless the entire world.  God bring well-being to this specific person or situation.  The more microscopic prayers for specifics engage the caring faculties of the petitioner in a way that might provide a caring orientation toward the person or situation such that one is more apt to fulfill the aspect of the Serenity prayer of having the "courage to change things that one is able to change."

Aphorism of the Day, October 15, 2024

Whirlwind, tempest, storm are attending metaphors for God in Hebrew Scriptures.  This bespeaks of the human inability to know the future as actual in face of omni-probabilities which confront human at anytime.  How do we discern communication from God arising from the whirlwind of omni-probabilities of what may happen?

Aphorism of the Day, October 14, 2024

Life is often about how to discern the significant difference between the potential and the actual.  To make the potential equal to the actual is not just "counting chickens" before they hatch, it is to elevate a false future and neglect the obvious now.

Aphorism of the Day, October 13, 2024

In biblical typology, Adam represents humanity entering moral agency and with the multiplication of bad practices we created a humanly determined tendency toward soiling innocency with a plethora of bad choices creating an environment with a tipping probability for people to be more bad than good.  Jesus arrived in no perfect and innocent environment of pre-moral agency infancy but within the collection of events which seem to determine humanity toward probable bad outcomes.  In this morass, in contrast to Adam as typical moral agent, Jesus exemplified Unique Sonship of the divine making the right choices within the morass of human probabilities.

Aphorism of the Day, October 12, 2024

Another way to understand the condition of sin is to be alienated in awareness of the inheritance of creation, namely, of being made in God's image as a child of God.

Aphorism of the Day, October 11, 2024

Some people treat the words of the Bible as though they were causatively absolute for why thing have occurred when the words are actually those which arose in ancient cultures as wisdom insights in a wide array of discursive practices regarding the discovery of God as the highest value.  They also are collections of words which had long community approval processes for including them in the various canons of being the "official" and authoritative text books in various faith communities.

Aphorism of the Day, October 10, 2024

Books like the Bible are textual traces of peoples of ancient cultures.  We use these texts to imaginatively reconstruct these cultures, which sustained practices like slavery and the subjugation of women and in embracing their "authority" in our time we have to refrain from absolutizing ancient cultural practices which do not represent the very best of love and justice.  Accepting the reality that interpretations of the past change significantly through time is crucial for creative advance in the pursuit of more perfect love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, October 9, 2024

When a discourse of spiritual aesthetics as is found in the Bible is treated as scientific discourse of the empirically verifiable, the interpretive practice results in what is called "fundamentalism."  This is both a insult to science and spirituality, by assuming that the only truths in life have to be empirically verifiable as well as denying that science and  spiritual discourse cannot co-exist in mutually reciprocal ways.  What unifies all discourses is the always already mystery of there being MORE.

Aphorism of the Day, October 8, 2024

Religion, science, art, poetry, jurisprudence, politics, are all strategies of living with the mystery of probabilities, i.e., of what may happen.  Each has a discursive lane in this epic effort, and people need to learn how to stay in the discursive lane appropriate to the strategy.

Aphorism of the Day, October 7, 2024

Rather than using the law as a personal check list for what we think that we've achieved in good living, we should be future thinking in asking ourselves what is the next best thing that I need to do to surpass myself in a future state.  What we yet need to do should make us humble about what we think that we've already done.

Aphorism of the Day, October 6, 2024

The irony of the American democratic system was to have a government which prevented different Christians from persecuting and killing each other for religious reasons.  Non-Christian government enforced a minimum of charity among Christians by saying "You can't hurt each other.  You can't burn your religious opponents at the stake.  And you can no longer dunk women in water because you call them heretical witches."  Once any religious confessional system is elevated to have government authority charity in practice is lost for those who do not conform.

Aphorism of the Day, October 5, 2024

Total probability is beyond individual events and agents of good and bad.  It is permissive of both in their lesser freedom while being necessarily weak in not taking sides in what may happen.  The weakness of such great Freedom is what accounts for genuine moral validity absent any coercive determinism.

Aphorism of the Day, October 4, 2024

I think that the child motif is a prominent one in the Gospels because empathy with a vulnerable infant or child is needed to act in the Christly way of taking care of the vulnerable.  This is a chief Gospel value.

Aphorism of the Day, October 3, 2024

Science is a method of statistical approximation to analyze and manipulate the physical world with the discovery of consistent patterns which aid prediction accuracy of future events.  In the human behavior sphere, laws have arisen in human community to provide best practices for the promulgation of the supreme values of a community trying to live together well.

 Aphorism of the Day, October 2, 2024

The Bible includes narrative which is like time lapsed photography.  It collapses years, months, and moments into the narrative event presenting the illusion that things actually happened faster than they do.  This can lead people to think that salvatory event do not happen quick enough for them in their lives.  Our lives are not time lapsed until the aftermath of telling our story from the isolated events of emergence of obvious signs of change.

Aphorism of the Day, October 1, 2024

The wisdom story of Job involves the Omni-Probable God of all interacting with lesser probable forces manifested in what happens to people.  The wise writer is writing a polemic against a simplistic notion that if you are good, then you have the perpetual attending proof of God's blessing of good luck and fortune and the theory that if bad things happen to you, it is proof that you are necessarily bad or worse than others.  In the free play of probabilities, very bad things can happen to good people.  Is it right to reject God when bad happenings happen to good people, and more poignant, to innocent people?  Does one blame God for the seeming injustice and thus find no reason for loyalty to God?  Or does one remain loyal to God precisely because of the weakness of God in refusing to interfere with the genuine freedom of what may happen to anyone?  The freedom of the choice of sentient human beings and the seeming random freedom of non-sentient beings validates the worth of moral decision, which is more important than shallowly thinking that God is just for rubber stamping my life's good fortune.  If God is a badge I wear to prove that I am favored and blessed by good luck, then such a view deserves to be crushed when "bad luck" hits me.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2024

Aphorism of the Day, September 30, 2024

In the field of probability where there is an infinite play among infinite particular agents with degrees of freedom, the supreme good is actually freedom.  In what actually happens the task of faith is to assert goodness as the preferred norm, which persists as such even when what is bad seems to be winning the situation of human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, September 29, 2024

When events and people are gone from one's life, memories remain as a powerful engine of engagement with the present.  Memories have trained our intellectual muscles to respond in ways that we did in the past even though the context has changed.

Aphorism of the Day, September 28, 2024

The past is dead but lives now in traces in memories some of which are retained by all of the memory technologies, e.g. text, video, et. al.  We interacted with the traces that are accessible to us and we cannot help but add ourselves to them in manifold ways which in turn add to the traces given to the future.

Aphorism of the Day, September 27, 2024

What good is there in conserving great things of the past, if the greatness does not have within it the dynamic adaptability to be interpretatively pragmatic in applied justice and love to new situations in the future?  Why would we want the great biblical principles of love and justice which were generated in cultural conditions of slavery and subjugation of women to retain those cultural conditions in our time?  Great principles in time have the eventual ability to expose the hidden hypocrisies of human cultural practices.

Aphorism of the Day, September 26, 2024

The constant awareness of the horrific should not lead for us to equate our discomfort with knowing about such horrific events with the people who are innocently in harm's way of such events.  We cannot claim vicarious fatigue on behalf of those on the front line of assaults.

Aphorism of the Day, September 25, 2024

The Psalmist asked for a clean heart and renewed spirit.  Much of the healing of Jesus had to do with the health or making "clean" the interior lives of people.  Too many people like the Hollywood dramatic notions of "casting out demons," when in fact the goal of life is to learn how to have a healthy interior life.  Yes, dramatic events do occur from within people on the way to health.  People like instant magical cures as opposed to the life long process of learning to live with psychological health.  By having "break through" events of health doesn't exempt us from the continuing process of living in healthy ways.

Aphorism of the Day, September 24, 2024

Perfectionism breeds procrastination which is the delay for the impossibility of the perfect and final answer or response to the way things are.  Life is more like tap dancing in a minefield and keeping vigilant to step in the better place as opposed to the worse place, with continual glances toward the destinations of perceived better moments.  Accepting the vocation as such a tap dancer is important to also appreciate the beauty of the dance with the knowledge that the overall setting is more glorious than the dangerous mines.

Aphorism of the Day, September 23, 2024

"Whoever is not against us is for us."  This saying is a reminder not to get caught up in "ministerial exclusivism and paranoia" about competition among people trying to do good but with quite different strategies and perspectives.

Aphorism of the Day, September 22, 2024

Using AI, artificial intelligence, to write would be a misnomer.  It it might better be called an "editorial interactive reading with a generator of targeted probable words for specific contexts."  The future of AI "writing" will kill the author.  Will the AI user have to list HAL as the co-author?

Aphorism of the Day, September 21, 2024

Faith as persuasion might be the key diagnostic construct to reveal the motivation of anyone about anything.  The New Testament Greek word for faith meant persuasion in Aristotle.

Aphorism of the Day, September 20, 2024

If language is a personal medium is everything personal?  Why designate somethings as impersonal?  Is the divine the result of a projection of personality upon all Probability of Occurrences?  Is the task of science to demythologize personality of total probability by saying that one cannot impute greater Personal motives for why certain specific things happen to people?  Can one designate the great Personality of the universe as Creative Freedom where the impersonal is an designation of honestly admitting that we can't precisely cite a telling motive behind what is always already happening?  Personality is a human story of being compelled to find meaning in the micro-situations of our lives because personhood is the attempt to find identity in relationships.

Aphorism of the Day, September 19, 2024

We do not know what would have been new until it is already old, when we look back and say, "That was new."  But isn't past tense new an oxymoron?

Aphorism of the Day, September 18, 2824

When an infinite number of events are causally connected with each other, it is rather arrogant to presume to know too much about causality.  This does not absolve us from responsibility for preventing seeable impact causal events of harm.  Further, doing good creates burgeoning effects among all other events so we have the responsibility to fill our areas of influence with goodness so as to create an osmosis of good collateral effects.

Aphorism of the Day, September 17, 2024

New Testament mystagogy may be about being able to access what is always already presence because of the divine image on one's life.  How does one "re-access" what harsh environments have taught us to lose?  Follow the "new birth" and child motifs of the words of Jesus.  Recovery is "new" birth.

Aphorism of the Day, September 16, 2024

One should not miss the child motif in the words of Jesus.  He noted that the disciples could be childish adults in their selfish desire to be "first."  He highlighted that they should be "child like" in having motives that had not been corrupted by becoming childish adults with controlling needs.  

Aphorism of the Day, September 15, 2024

If we are being honest, we must admit that we still live in the age the suffering servant Messiah.  There is no heaven on earth, no Utopia, but one endlessly delayed in hope because we believe it is better to be inspired by hopeful good rather than fateful evil.

Aphorism of the Day, September 14, 2024 (Holy Cross Day)

The cross is perhaps the most re-valued object in human history.  How does a cruel instrument of capital punishment become rendered in gold and silver cross necklaces even worn by one's baby?  In the mystagogy of Paul, identity with the mode of the death of Jesus became the spiritual power to die to what is unworthy in one's life.  The cross has become a spiritual talisman.

Aphorism of the Day, September 13, 2024

What is the rhetorical purpose of talking about things which have not and cannot ever be humanly experienced and related to people who are currently living?  Created out of nothing?  Who has ever experienced "nothingness?"  Yet nothing is a word for what has not been experienced.  What is the rhetorical purpose of using words like the "end of time?"  How does one posit an end of there being language users to speak about to those who are alive and using language?  Is it coping language to survive what can seem to be so wrong with the way things are now.  The philosopher whom some thought was going mad, Nietzsche one wrote in an aphorism, "The thought of suicide gets me through many a night."  Is rhetorical non-being merely a way to cope with harshness of what life may be for any number of people at any time?

Aphorism of the Day, September 12, 2024

The notion of messiah is not a finished notion because it continues within time of people who continue to interpret its significance.  The apocalyptic genre in the Bible and non-biblical writings bring to bear a continuous future which continuously delays any notion of final fulfillment.  Nothing is final as long as there is Time, and since Time is final, becoming is what is primary.  Such becoming means continuous openness to what will yet become.  Jesus manifest the human messianic in specific ways and fuller messianic is deferred to what the Risen Christ continues to do through those who embrace the Christly presence, with Christly ideals, with Christly behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, September 11, 2024

The notion of messiah arises from a variety of language traditions about anointed and telling leaders of God who happen in history.  The New Testament traditions settle upon Jesus as a unique son (child) of God figure whose life instantiates "messianic" values or the values which promote the two greatest values which are stated in the summary of the law: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.  From the many written traditions of messiah and The Messiah, one finds quite a quilt work of agreement, contrasts, and even seeming contradictions.  Just as time is not finished, speaking is not finished, Scripture (inspired writing) is not finished, the messiah tradition is not finished yet.  The futurism implied in biblical apocalyptic is an indication that the messianic is an ever open tradition with the dream of a final justice which is to be the inspiration for its instantiation in events of justice now.  Messiah as Justice is always beckoning with the bending lure of it arc;  we need to always be pushing the arc of justice in the right direction.

Aphorism of the Day, September 10, 2024

In the process of the development of Christian tradition one can note that later advanced notions of the Messiah are inserted into the narrative presentations of Jesus in the Gospels in dialogue with other notions of Messiah.

Aphorism of the Day, September 9, 2024

The Gospels, in part, are constructed around a topic of early disagreement within parties of Judaism regarding the identity of Messiah.

Aphorism of the Day, September 8, 2024

Since the natural sciences have become the standard of truth, to honor that standard of truth, many have felt it necessary to present all things human within the standard of something being true only if it could be empirically verified.  Hence aesthetic truths have become the tolerated neglected step-sisters of science, even while in popular culture non-scientific truths of religion, spirituality, myth, art, cinema, and music have flourished in their "non-truthful" ways of just being popularly relevant.

Aphorism of the Day, September 7, 2024

The Gospels are writing art reconstructing narratives about Jesus with the knowledge of what had happened in the Gentile Jesus Movement.  Such writing cannot avoid being anachronistic because of the quest for the origins of what has become the community practice, namely, the inclusion of Gentiles who do not have to conformed to the ritual purity of Judaism.

Aphorism of the Day, September 6, 2024

We live our lives caught within Language.  Everything inside and outside has linguistic coding as we live on a treadmill of endless taxonomy of more meaning being produced about the previous meanings which we have inherited as we interpret with what we have inherited in our language what we think is happening to us now.

Aphorism of the Day, September 5, 2024

Much of the New Testament came to text when there was not a complete formal separation between synagogue and members of the Jesus Movement so the writing reflect intra-religious disagreements.  Family arguments are sometimes the most severe because the ones closest can hurt one the most because of shared past.  Perhaps the greatest disagreement was the insight that the Jesus Movement had to be a Christo-centric Judaism which was made accessible to Gentile inhabitants of the Roman Empire through the dispensing with the ritual purity requirements which characterized the need to retain a distinction from Gentiles.

Aphorism of the Day, September 4, 2024

The framers of the American Constitution should get credit for enforcing charity among Christians.  After all an American citizen can't be excommunicated or burnt at the stake for believing something different than the majority.

Aphorism of the Day, September 3, 2024

Sayings of Jesus are presented as hard sayings even using mockingly the prejudices which existed between ethnic groups.  As in, "it's not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs."  The rhetorical wisdom purpose of such a seemingly cruel statement was to goad faith in belief of being persuaded about health as something which is beyond trivial issues of one's tribal preferences.

Aphorism of the Day, September 2, 2024

Does a "rhetorical device" mean the conscious use of a language strategy to accomplish a specific rhetorical purpose?  Do rhetorical devices occur in regular language use in unconscious ways as being the common habit of one's culture?  Are New Testament writings successions of rhetorical devices with a persuasive goal?

Aphorism of the Day, September 1, 2024

The unavoidable human task is to make everything into a language product.  Such continuous effort makes it seems as though we "control" things we cannot control and we define control by manipulation by and through creation of language products.

Aphorism of the Day, August 2024

Aphorism of the Day, August 31, 2024

The American experience in part was formed as a system to "keep Christians in charitable practice with others."  In short, opposing Christian groups were not to burn their religious opponents at the stake.   American Christians are people of faith often divided by having a common founder, Jesus.  In the establishment or our Constitution, not any religious group was given the authority to impose their habits of belief and practice on anyone else.  Obviously, the framers learned from European religious persecution, and the history in the colonies of events like the "witch" trials (or males with power to punish women for being different than men wanted them to be)  in Salem.

Aphorism of the Day, August 30, 2024

Theology is a movement between the macroscopic and microscopic, but it is mostly microscopic projection upon the mysterious macroscopic which is the certainty of the Great Negligible without having precise ability to know it except in how it gets funneled into the bits of the anthropomorphic of the microscopic life of human language.

Aphorism of the Day, August 29, 2024

Counter dynamics occur when narrowing identity features of our lives like country, region, family, socio-economic, educational, religious group status become used for implying other people with other identity in corresponding ways are somehow less favored by God than we are.  One could look at Rabbi Jesus as a reformer who was trying to say that God belongs to everyone and is accessible to everyone in immanent ways which occurs within each person.  Everyone has image of God identity; every other identity is secondary.

Aphorism of the Day, August 28, 2024

The impulse to be completely private and secret is a loneliness which is assuaged by the "limited" sharing within secret clubs, secret societies, or discreet friendships.  Such secret groups have exclusive rules stated or implicit.  When one tries to impose such "secret society insider rules" upon the entire human populace, then the greater part of humanity in the practice of the exclusive is "excommunicated" from God's favor.  Jesus did not believe that the message of God's love should be segregated within secret club practice.

Aphorism of the Day, August 27, 2024

How to live in equilibrium?  To have interior feelings agree with one's speech and body language.  Law abiding society is built upon not acting out in speech and deeds everything that one feels.  Sublimating feeling energy into alternate speech and body deeds may be a part of spiritual practice.  Perhaps meditative poses and mantras.

Aphorism of the Day, August 26, 2024

In publicity religion, we say look at me doing religious things, while at the same time people are hungry, homeless, and generally neglected in the basic life necessities.  

Aphorism of the Day, August 25, 2024

Each day we act from the reservoir and repertoire of the possible language products which heretofore comprise our existence.  Repetition is new, and what we call inventively new is to reconfigure language products of speech, writing, and body language deeds in new order and arrangement.  The inventively new can arise from the traces of what has been and become another trace for a different future.

Aphorism of the Day, August 24, 2024

The central feature of faith is persuasion and persuasion is language based in how our speech, writing, and body language is constituted toward living goals.  The Bible are words of intervention in our lives of language to persuade toward superlative values.

Aphorism of the Day, August 23, 2024

People live and act by their versions of life situations and people and those versions are learned.  Since they are learned, they can be unlearned and new versions can come to the fore.  We should be in the process of learning to refine our versions of life and people toward what love and justice means in application.

Aphorism of the Day, August 22, 2024

Each of us each day has to deal with and learn to accept how the great plenitude of everything that has happen has been funneled into the particular influences upon the specifics of our lives.  We can presume to know too much about how we have been determined, and diminish and excuse our current volitional agency for new action.  Certainly myth and poetry can be an appropriate way to deal with what we do not and cannot know but we should not be theoretical about harm and injustice which are evident and present at hand.  Theoretical fatalism about harm and injustice cannot be an excuse for delaying actions to end both.

Aphorism of the Day, August 21, 2024

Because we see and mediate our world through language, we cannot help but see the world through the order which language imposes upon the world even by naming what is disorder.  In science, we use language to cite predicable, probable, patterns of order in the world.  When we try to understand order in human behaviors, we find less consistent patterns.  From trial and error practices within human behaviors, we have come to posit laws for recommended behaviors for various contexts.  The great laws of love and justice have to be continually applied in new contexts and such applications are not like the consistency of boiling water in different location;  they require the continual wisdom of re-application in situations when more knowledge of the participants is continually being revealed and unfolded.  How do we apply love and justice when situations have come to reveal more diverse identities within participants who are welcomed as have equal place within the community.

Aphorism of the Day, August 20, 2024

Modern anachronistic interpretation of biblical writings occur when there is the assumption that biblical writers were writing in the genre of modern eye-witness journalistic reporting and scientific philosophical language which states, a statement is meaningfully true if and only it can be empirical verified.  Trying to import these genres as the writing genres of biblical writer has lead to diminution of the equally important truth status of the languages of faith, love, community identity, and praise discourse for the truth of one's highest values.

Aphorism of the Day, August 19, 2024

If John's Gospel were written only be taken literally then Christians would be literal cannibals eating flesh and drinking blood.  Would that Christian readers would understand that Scripture is spiritual art written for people trying to succeed in the holistic art of living well.

Aphorism of the Day, August 18, 2024

Using the notion that faith is the manifestation of the values that we are persuaded about, I suggest that we make the very language based notion of persuasion as the starting place to analyze the complimentary and competing persuasions within one's own life and between parties of persuasion.  We can have different faiths at the same time, like we can be persuaded about an America with division between church and state, and at the same time be a part of a community which is persuaded about religious beliefs.  People who want a theocratic state are people who believe that they can be the "perfect" governmental form who exclusively and by law and force require people to conform to their own way of being persuaded about God.

Aphorism of the Day, August 17, 2024

Because we have language, we cannot help but anthropomorphize everything which comes to language.  Language is personal, so we project personality upon everything by virtue of using language.  So, God as Plenitude does not escape having personality from humans who cannot help but use language.  It is unavoidable for humans to conceive and speak in anything other than "personal" terms.

Aphorism of the Day, August 16, 2024

Consuming is a metaphor for how we have taken on the significant words of our lives.  In John's Gospel, Jesus is referred to as the Word, who is God.  So, the consuming of Jesus the Word is to take the Christly values deep within oneself and reconstitute one's life.  Is taking on word real and substantial?  It is as substantial as if one is eating flesh and blood.  Flesh and blood are metaphors for the human common sense tendency to indicate that what is seen and touched is somehow "more real" than the invisible words which have come to comprise our understanding of existence.

Aphorism of the Day, August 15, 2024

"those who eat my flesh and drink my blood?"  The Johannine channeler of words of Jesus when speaking/writing in the name of Jesus, is challenging crass literalism in language use, even while piggy backing the substantiality metaphor of the physical world to indicate that spiritual and non-literal description of experiences like mysticism and Eucharist are very substantially and meaningfully true in ways that are different than common sense reality.

Aphorism of the Day, August 14, 2024

Faith is the life habit of being persuaded.  Being persuaded pertains to different objects of persuasion in different discursive practices.  What one is persuaded about in science and the methods for that persuasion are different than the kinds of persuasions one has in one's spiritual life.  The two shouldn't be confused even as a person can have faith in the spiritual sense and in the scientific sense at the same time without contradiction.

Aphorism of the Day, August 13, 2024

Sometimes the impulse of wanting immediate perfection for others in the political realm blinds us from being practical about very incremental steps towards being better than we have been.  I want complete perfection (as I see it) or nothing is the recipe for a selfish quietism and can result in greater evil of two imperfect options winning the day.

Aphorism of the Day, August 12, 2024

The writer of John's Gospel aim is indicate that spiritual enlightenment is awakening to a different understanding of language.  The crassly literal is mocked by blatantly suggesting cannibal practice: Eat my flesh, drink my blood.  The Gospel of John invites us to be poets who are influenced by a mystical experience which happens to people living ordinary common sense life.

Aphorism of the Day, August 11, 2024

With a certain amount of randomness but also within predictable parameters of what can come to language for any person at anytime, one participates in the events of language production even while one is also a product of language in how one's speech, writing, and body deeds is pre-constituted before another occasion in the linguistic field.

Aphorism of the Day,  August 10, 2024

Heuristics is effort to be creatively inventive in solving problems.  Within a tradition of specialized language use like religion, to be inventive in the task of persuasion about the chief values of one's community, one becomes steeped in the inherited traditions and presents an inventive continuity of the new with the old.  Invention is a new blend dealing with what has arisen in the experience of a new genius value setter arising.  New Testament writers had to deal with the genius of Jesus in continuity with what had gone before.

Aphorism of the Day, August 9, 2024

The borrowing, transference of reference, and repurposing of metaphors occur in the New Testament.  Torah was referred to as living bread and in the living bread discourse Jesus is said to be the living bread which comes down from heaven.

Aphorism of the Day, August 8, 2024

One could call biblical writings and all religious discourse as "identity discourse." Such discourse totemic writing for community identity around the shared highest values.

Aphorism of the Day, August 7, 2024

John's Gospel is a writing about Word and language use, challenging the notion that literal use or empirical verification is the only way to access meaningful sublime truths in our lives.  Life without artistic, spiritual, and aesthetic truths would essentially be removing heart or aesthetic emotional IQ as valid modes of perception which could not co-exist with meaningful empirical verification.

Aphorism of the Day, August 6, 2024 (Feast of the Transfiguration)

The event of the Transfiguration presents Jesus as light.  As the earth turns we are deprived of its light at night, only to have it return in the morning.  Light is symbolic of spiritual enlightenment, which is progressive.  Each day we need new light and new light helps us see new things in different way.  We need to work at uncovering and removing the obstacles which keep us from seeing new things in new ways in the necessary creative advance to which we are called.

Aphorism of the Day, August 5, 2024

Part of appropriating the biblical writings is knowing how the external means the interior, as in "coming down from heaven" means arising from the inner abode to become manifest in the world.

Aphorism of the Day, August 4, 2024

Bread symbolizes the need for food for human life.  What proceeds bread?  Word or language which is the very medium for thinking and doing or even knowing that one needs bread.  Before we live by bread, we live by Word, the profound reservoir of connectedness in which we live, move, and have our being/becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, August 3, 2024

The ancient saying, "humanity does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God," is expressed the bread of heaven discourse in a figurative way.  In John's God, Christ is the Eternal Word of God, proceeding from God.  Word is the prior condition for being people who have come to make bread for our physical existence but the spiritual Word condition is inseparably present in eating bread, including Eucharistic bread.

Aphorism of the Day, August 2, 2024

St. Paul as a prisoner did not envision a Christian Roman nationalism; his mysticism was more cosmic.  He proposed for everyone to grow into becoming the body of Christ, or living with each other as those who were made in the image of God respecting that image within each other with behaviors of kindness and care.

Aphorism of the Day, August 1, 2024

The "bread of heaven" discourse in John came to writing around the same time as the Juvenal writing, "give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt."

Aphorism of the Day, July 2024

Aphorism of the Day July 31, 2024

The writers of the New Testament who believed that the sign of God could be seen in all creation believed that Jesus Christ was a particular human signature of God in the world to signify that God can be intensely particular and intensely general.

Aphorism of the Day, July 30, 2024

Are language products mostly "selfish" since they are generated from the perspective of the one or ones who generate them?  Would this make AI statements "unselfish" because they purport to have a distance from any particular "constructing ego?"  Or are AI statements like the mercenaries on behalf of the egos who seek their generation on behalf of an "ego" position?

Aphorism of the Day, July 29, 2024

According to the Johannine words of Jesus, the "work" is believing in the one whom God sends.  Belief or being persuaded reveals what the human vocation is.  We are persuaded people, and the question remains, "about what are we persuaded?"  Persuasion is never final; it is on-going and always has to be continually informed and applied in new arising situations.

Aphorism of the Day, July 28, 2024

From Anselm we learned that God is a linguistic tautology.  By definition, God means the greatest, and how could the greatest be the greatest if the greatest did not exist.  Anselm invites people to try to drop from human vocabulary the word God and the standard meaning of God.  While we're at it we can try to pretend that everything that was, is, and shall be does not "exist" either.  Whatever we perceive to be existing from our very limited perspective, there is, was, and will always be MORE.

Aphorism of the Day, July 27, 2024

The significance of Jesus was not new for the Gospel writers since for them he was known in their Risen Christ experience in a mystical event.  The Gospels are about tying the mysticism of the early followers of Jesus to the person of Jesus of Nazareth by presenting narratives of Jesus tinged with already mystical outcomes of the Risen Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, July 26, 2024

The "sign"ificance of signs occur within paradigms of interpretation or hermeneutic circles.  If one does not understand the hermeneutic context, the "sign" cannot signify as intended by the sign maker.

Aphorism of the Day, July 25, 2024

What is the relationship between a sign and language?  A sign is a significant event of and in language marking a telling item of information distinguished from other word events to influence life decisions and human behaviors.  A stop sign changes the meaning of a street corner in influencing decision and behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, July 24, 2024

A chief sign of human identity is having language.  Language is the life of being signatory or constantly being involved in a medium with word products which purport to refer to or be signs of things which are not themselves.  What words refer to or Reality itself is unknowable in itself because we are slaves to the medium of continuous signification involving a continuous deferring of synonyms.  This is this is this is this is this is this......

Aphorism of the Day, July 23, 2024

Paul prayed that people would comprehend the love of Christ and be filled with the fullness of God.  The goal of life is to have surfaced the omnipresence of the divine in various immanent events.

Aphorism of the Day, July 22, 2024

The stories of the multiplication of loaves identifies Jesus as concerned about the masses being fed.  Any follower of Jesus should also be concerned that everyone has enough to eat.  Food is the basic medicine of living.

Aphorism of the Day, July 21, 2024

Sheep without shepherds are people vulnerable to demagoguery of kleptocrats convincing the ignorant that the interest of the wealthy greedy is the common good for all.

 Aphorism of the Day, July 20, 2024

Some people have the fortune of experiencing their lives being impinged upon by the Plenitude of Existence as a friendly and supporting and affirming reality.  Others do not have this fortune which means that who who have the fortune need to become the nurturing presence for those who don't see existence itself as an original blessing.

Aphorism of the Day, July 19, 2024

Everything is mutually connected.  The human mind has the (dys)ability to create the illusion of alienation and separation with resulting attempts to wreck connection with chaos and its acolytes of hatred and evil.

Aphorism of the Day, July 18, 2024

Human beings do not have the capacity to "see" God and live; human beings have the ability to be in connection with God who contains all in exterior and interior ways.  Meditation is the practice of finding the interior hum caused by the flood of infinity with which all things are connected.

Aphorism of the Day, July 17, 2024

Paul understood the social meaning of the cross of Christ as a death to the hostilities which pertained between people formerly regarding each others as foreigners, aliens, and strangers.  Does anyone regard the cross of Christ in this way today?  Often it is used by people to create barriers and make us even more foreign to each other.

Aphorism of the Day, July 16, 2024

The biblical use of the word shepherd refers to non-exploitive leadership of the vulnerable.  We often see political "leaders" and religious "leaders" who are the antithesis of non-exploitive leadership.

Aphorism of the Day, July 15, 2024

The observation of the crowd as "sheep without a shepherd" invites reflections upon the need for non-exploitative leadership in politics, religion, and in any community requiring group collaboration.  In politics, business, and religion exploiters use the "a sucker is born every minute" tendency of the mob.

Aphorism of the Day, July 14, 2024

Has any historical figure had more of an afterlife effect than Jesus of Nazareth?

Aphorism of the Day, July 13, 2024

Can history be written without any reference to heroic figures?  Only people who stand out get remembered and documented.  A history of the unknown would be an oxymoron.  Our traditions and stories of identity have been formed by what has come to language about seminal people in history.  Our language traditions speak us before we consciously choose to use them.  By choosing not to use certain words or ideas from inherited language traditions does not erase them from being foundational in our having been structured by them.

Aphorism of the Day, July 12, 2024

St. Paul regarded to be his mystical relationship with the Risen Christ as different but equal in importance to Peter's actual experience of Jesus, plus Peter also had a mystical Post-resurrection experience too.  It is one thing to say that mystical experiences actually happened, it is another thing to say what they mean and how the one who experiences such interprets the experience.  Religious experiences are so much different from commonsense or empirical experiences, it is important not to equate them.  Mystical experience is more like one's aesthetic experience with music, poetry, and art rather than describing the events of a lab experience.

Aphorism of the Day, July 11, 2024

Today we have become specific manifestations of former probabilities.  But probabilities are but current interpretations of what we think were statistical approximations of what we think caused the specific outcomes of the present, which are also interpretations of what a particular language user describes within the language tradition of his or her community.

Aphorism of the Day, July 10, 2024

What does Word of God mean?  For some it means the community process by which certain writings came to be designated as the official textbook of their communities.  For others it means that the divine directly created these words and so there is an implied omniscience behind every word in the Bible.  In the funneling of a great God into the limitation of human experience, there is an emptying of God as God into God as analogical human communication.  The emptying occurs in human cultures with all the limitations of the particular cultures.  We can absolutize the notion of love, without absolutizing what the specific practices of love were in biblical cultures.  Beyond the written words of text, there is the notion of God as Word itself which is a profoundly expansive reservoir vaster than what can be written on pages.

Aphorism of the Day, July 9, 2024

Prayer like the Psalms models what can be a continuous commentary on what is happening in one's life and the life of the world.  Stating the obvious as interpreted by the commentator before God has less to do with God and more to do with our orientation and coping with life as it is, laced with lots of hope for what we wish it might be.  Prayer is about changing the one who is praying so as to be able to be the best possible agent of change.

Aphorism of the Day, July 8, 2024

With advent of artificial intelligence the possibility of HAL like entities taking significant control over human life becomes real, some for good and some for terrifying outcomes.  In the big theodicy question does an Omni-Becoming Being allowing genuine freedom from all non-omni-becoming beings risk the takeover of the whole by bad actors?  Does the Omni-Sustainer remain what is greatest if the majority of what lives and moves and have being within the Omni-Sustainer chooses what is bad?  Or is there a self-correction by the preponderance of non-sentient volitional entities which are "amoral" when contrasted with any meaning of human morality.  Do non-sentient "amoral" agents eventual correct bad human agency?

Aphorism of the Day, July 7, 2024

Time and language go together because language involves sequences.

Aphorism of the Day, July 6, 2024

The actual is the model for what might be ideal because the actual is always so time-time as to be the "not yet" of perfection.

Aphorism of the Day, July 5, 2024

Seems as when the church has had outward position and power in society, it tends to reject or de-emphasize the hidden or the mystical and over identifies itself with the literal and the visual.  The suffering or hidden church emphasizes the always already inner realm of the divine while eschewing attachment to external idols.

Aphorism of the Day, July 4, 2024

The familiarity which breeds contempt may be the human habit of even getting bored with good things and not appreciating the good until it is gone, like when people are so familiar with democracy and yet do not vote or vote for someone who is not in favor of democracy.

Aphorism of the Day, July 3, 2024

Totality is not final because it is the always already accumulating and integrating.  That which is omni-becoming says in the instance of any occasion, "I contain you and have merged you with everything else."

Aphorism of the Day, July 2, 2024

There is a voluntary weakness of God.  It is the power of restraint in the allowing of genuine freedom which is evident in the seemingly apparent ascendency of the greedy and powerful to oppress or resist being sharing stewards in equal and just ways with all people.  The religion of Jesus is mostly the poor using their freedom to take care of those who also are poor.  This is the most powerful way to use freedom.  (see the beatitudes)

Aphorism of the Day, July 1, 2024

The cliche is "familiarity breeds contempt."  Getting tired of or bored with the familiar may be a sign of a need for change or the need for a conversion to a new paradigm in thinking.