Aphorism of the Day, September 2024

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.

Aphorism of the Day, June 2024

Aphorism of the Day, June 30, 2024

Freud's designation of religion as illusion is probably based on his failure and the failure of religionists to properly know the differences between scientific and common sense discourse and discourse which pertains to dreams, myths, faith, love, and poetry.  Freud did not believe one could be a scientist and a theist even though he believed strongly in the "truths" of the language manifestations of the unconscious.  He had his surrogate theology.  We need to free ourselves from either/or thinking about faith and science and resolve it with both/and thinking based upon the truth continuum of the expansive discursive human capacity, which might be religiously justified in the phrase, "And the Word was God."

Aphorism of the Day, June 29, 2024

Hope is the inescapable orientation to a better future.  Religious faiths are built on hope, on what is not yet but what should be.  Freud criticized this as the future of an illusion, or mere wishful thinking.  He saw such illusions as the grist for his language of the unconscious which if read with a guiding therapist could provide insights for our current behaviors so it is concerned with how our past determines our present and how we live with our past in the present.  Faith and hope work together to be related to how we want to surpass ourselves in excellence in the future.  How can we be more concerned about a better determining future than be morbidly burdened by an over-determining past?

Aphorism of the Day, June 28, 2024

Idealism, perfection, and Utopia vision present us with what is not and what cannot be, because everything in contrast is imperfect, sick, and far from ideal.  When we are sick in particular ways, we wish to know specific health and recovery.  Such recovery may not come when death happens or it may come in various ways with different time frames or it may come only partially requiring us to cope and live with "partial healthful condition."  The way to rid ourselves of idealism, perfection, and the utopian as haunting genres is to pretend that "hope" can be somehow psycho-surgically removed from the human experience.  And if such procedure could be accomplished, what we would have is the surrogate hope beyond the hope that was removed.

Aphorism of the Day, June 27, 2024

Is death the ultimate disease or sickness?  If so, we mostly want to have the opportunity to live within the statistical norms of life expectancy and we may designate "early" death as untimely.  On the way to the ultimate sickness of death, we are vulnerable to varying degrees of states of unhealthiness some of which drastically interrupt our normal life patterns and the lives of people who are close to us.  We learn to live as long as possible with unresolvable health issues even as we have the occasion to experience fortunate cures from certain debilitating conditions.  The cures of Jesus are regarded to be uncanny events defying the expected logical patterns of certain diseases.  We often forget that to be cured is to be healed temporarily to still undergo the final sickness of death.  We may get trapped in some strange theodicy if we think that we know the magic formula for why some people have uncanny cures and the vast majority do not.

Aphorism of the Day, June 26, 2024

Sickness is many faceted.  It is a disruption in what is consider the normal condition of not being sick.  There is the biblical sense that our world is perpetually sick in need of constant healing because of the condition of "sin."  While the "healings" of Jesus are stories of individuals' physical, mental, or spiritual conditions, as textual function, they imply the presence of Christ co-exists with our varying states of illness with salvation based upon our existing in everlastingness meaning perfection or health or salvation is the experience of completeness of being with everything else, past, present and future.  That may not be sufficient in the moments of felt forsakenness of pain and suffering.  But then even the sense of forsakenness and suffering cannot be separated from the completeness of everything.

Aphorism of the Day, June 25, 2024

The Bible includes accounts of the common human crisis of sickness, in all of its forms.  Sickness is when one's health is experienced as a significant detriment to one's quality of life or of one's immediate community.  It's not true to say that Jesus cured and cures all sickness.  What are we to make of the seemingly selective few who receive uncanny "cures" from health issues contrasted with those who did and do not?  Faithful people can have longstanding illness and all faithful people also die, even if they receive the resurrection death cure.  It behooves us not to overly literalize the healing stories of Jesus and be involved in theodicy nightmares because of such literalism.  Jesus can be understood to be a healer in coping with the general condition of sickness in time meaning everyone and each of their body organs have a shelf life.

Aphorism of the Day, June 24, 2024

A Yogism goes, "baseball is 90% mental; the other half is physical."  One might say something similar about health.  How much bad health has been facilitated by terrible nurturing contributing to the mental making the physical more vulnerable to be sick in various ways?

 Aphorism of the Day, June 23, 2024

Change and probable outcomes are the challenges of living by faith or being persuaded about meaningful purposes.

Aphorism of the Day, June 22, 2024

We can make the Bible a very foreign book if we treat the writers as those who did not know the difference between aesthetic spiritual writing and common sense observation of what happens in life.

Aphorism of the Day, June 21, 2024

Do language products such as speech acts, written products, and the body action choreography acts, change the reservoir of language from which they derived because the reservoir of language enlarges in time?

 Aphorism of the Day, June 20, 2024

In the calming of the storm on the sea, apparently Jesus worked directly with weather change.  What about Jesus working directly upon humanity whose habits have led to climate change and conditions which threaten us now?

Aphorism of the Day, June 19, 2024

We misread the Bible if we think that biblical writers did not understand the difference between common sense reporting and the genres used in their times to write about their heroes.

Aphorism of the Day, June 18, 2024

In life we prefer the miracle of bad things not happening to us, as in "I prefer the miracle of not getting cancer in the first place to the miracle to successful response to cancer treatment."  What would be the miracle of nothing bad happening at all?  In the clash of the free systems among all entities in life, bad things happen and the life of faith, or in Christian terms, the life of knowing Christly presence accompanying us no matter what happens, means living being persuaded about the good triumph of All remaining a sustaining All, no matter what happens.

Aphorism of the Day, June 17, 2024

In pondering the notion of "divine" intervention and the statistical study of what probably can happen, one might want to add the notion of personal relationship with the times of one's life and the experience of "kairos" or eventful time when one has the intermittent experience of the serendipitous fortuitous.  One does arrive at such interpretations of events in time as they relate to each other.

Aphorism of the Day, June 16, 2024

Language users can discover that the words of language are meant to refer to things which are not words and yet language users cannot escape the worded interpretive and taxonomical pre-programed cultural screens through which the "non-worded" world is experienced.  The non-worded world arrives to us through the mystery of language working within us.

Aphorism of the Day, June 15, 2024

The parables of the kingdom did not make the always already kingdom happened; they describe the serendipitous discoveries of the always, already realm of God.

Aphorism of the Day, June 14, 2024

The "realm or kingdom" tradition of the synoptic Gospels surely invited a comparison of the "worldwide" realm of the Caesar with the realm of God as presented by Jesus and Paul.  The Acts of the Apostles quotes Paul as saying, "we live and move and have our being in God."  That would mean that all other realms including the Caesars were contained by the greater Realm.

Aphorism of the Day, June 13, 2024

The use of language involves reducing what one experiences to the extent of one's language ability within the context of one's life.  This means that one has to offer the perpetual disclaimer about the plenitudinous universe: I just don't know and I might be wrong about what I think I know.

Aphorism of the Day, June 12, 2024

What is the political significance of proclaiming the kingdom or realm of God when the political reality was the kingdom of the Caesar who was regarded to be a god?

Aphorism of the Day, June 11, 2024

Reading strategy for the New Testament:  Read with the possible situations of readers for the years 55-110 C.E., not for the situations for readers in the years 28-31 C.E.

Aphorism of the Day, June 10, 2024

The parable of Jesus are less sayings for his own time but more about how the early Gospel communities were understanding the growing significance of the Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the Day, June 9, 2024

A feature of most holy books involve the clash between what has been with what is new which is offered.  Since holy books are canonized to being the final say on everything, one is left with the wrong impression that nothing new and surpassing can happen.

Aphorism of the Day, June 8, 2024

Those who wish to be delivered from their prison of anthropomorphism do not wish to be human.  However, from our human prisons we can confess our connection with everything which is not human.  Our continual perception of being part of a great MORE should keep us humble even while not minimizing the significant good collateral effects of being good and kind.

Aphorism of the Day, June 7, 2024

It may be uneasy for us to admit that the Gospels chronicle in story forms of the life of the ministry of Jesus the process of the Jesus party of Judaism becoming separated from other parties which remained ritually adherent to the Torah.  Jesus became associated with the people who did not require ritual adherence in matters of diet and circumcision et. al.

Aphorism of the Day, June 6, 2024

Language is the connecting art by language users with things which are not language but ends up being co-existent with language.  The person who claims to have had a pristine experience without language, used "pristine experience without language" to contradict and instantiate the connection of language with all things.

Aphorism of the Day, June 5, 2024

It is easy to say that one's opponent is out of "his mind."  Perhaps it is more rhetorically proper to say, "he lives in a completely different thought paradigm than I do."

Aphorism of the Day, June 4, 2024

The mission of the early followers of Jesus were to comprise themselves as a family beyond the natural family and local ethnic identity.  They believed that Jesus proclaimed God as the parent of everyone.

Aphorism of the Day, June 3, 2024

According to the Gospel, Jesus was accused of being out of his mind and in league with Beelzebul.  We may be in a similar age of lying when evil is called good and good is called evil.

Aphorism of the Day, June 2, 2024

The principle of the law is to learn to take a rest from the work of doing wrong and harmful things.  The entire world needs to take a rest from the work of hatred, war, and greed.

Aphorism of the Day, June 1, 2024

At the very least, the Sabbath principle is about the basic principle of rest which is a needed renewal phase for human life.  The Sabbath requirement is a legislation of something that is good for our health.

Aphorism of the Day, May 2024

Aphorism of the Day, May 31, 2024

One can look at Sabbath as legalistic requirement for behaviors on a day of worship, or one can see it as a basic principle of people needing rest sprinkled throughout their lives.  It becomes a religious law so that a minimum is enforced so that authorities cannot deny the rest privilege to what everyone needs.

Aphorism of the Day, May 30, 2024

An ancient "labor union" injunction: keep the sabbath.  Seven days of labor could not be forced upon anyone and use religious justification.

Aphorism of the Day, May 29, 2024

The Sabbath principle is the principle of balancing of active life with rest.  One might see the arising of Sabbath as a way of forcing person with wealth to provide their "servants" with rest so that they could not be completely exploited.

Aphorism of the Day, May 28, 2024

The quest of the law is justice for everyone equally.  When laws serve only the rights and opportunity of a privileged class of people, justice is not served.  The goal of a just society is to provide equal access to justice in equal ways to everyone.  But how many poor people have unlimited resources for legal assistance?

Aphorism of the Day, May 27, 2024

It's one thing to believe that there are behaviors which are legal and right in life; it is another thing to be rightfully related to the law.  The application of the law is more of an art than a science but it is both in that it relies upon the honest reporting of what actually happened coupled with a sensitive heart for loving relationships within a community.  Jesus said that the sabbath law was made for humanity, not humanity for the sabbath law.  The literal application of the law can sometimes result in harm.  A law that is seen as consistent as a well oiled machine can sometimes grind and hurt those who do not understand its functioning purpose.

Aphorism of the Day, May 26, 2024

The language of science is privileged because it results in the most effective and consistent manipulation of our external world.  When we experience things that we cannot explain, like why love happens, why we are moved by poetry, art, music, and seeing the ocean, the sky, the mountains, and other phenomenon of nature,  we resort to the very unscientific "wow" language that seems to be another discourse of language appropriate to such experiences.  Modern fundamentalism has occurred because certain "religious" persons have tried to say that "wow" language is actually scientific language.  So we have much discursive confusion.

Aphorism of the Day, May 25, 2024

In the use of  language we define and definitions create tautologies, as in God=the Greatest.  From such tautologies it follows that greatness at the very least involves superlative personhood, because humans are personal, and to be greater than human would be to have the greatest form of Personhood.  Even though such arguments are circular, they have meaningful relevance in our continual exploration of personhood.  We don't deny God Personhood because we don't deny that in ourselves.

Aphorism of the Day, May 24, 2024

One might say that the implicit understanding of God as Trinity arose because the words in the Traditions of Jesus regarding how he understood himself and his relationship to the divine.

Aphorism of the Day, May 23, 2024

The Trinity is a stated value about Personalism being central to human life.  Having language is what distinguishes human in knowing anything at all.  Language is personal because language is the basis of knowing relationships.  The Trinity presents a a dynamic equality in differences Personhood.  Life lived well is about the equality of harmony among the different people in life.  The Trinity models a Communal Personalism which we strive for with the practice of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, May 22, 2024

Language itself is the main metaphor for what is not language and comes to language.  Within the field of language in human attempts to relate to Plenitude, God-language traditions have occurred.  The Trinitarian language tradition arose, mainly because of the words in the Jesus tradition in how he is presented in his words regarding himself, God his Father, and the Advocate Spirit.

Aphorism of the Day, May 21, 2024

The Trinity arose within the Christian community as a standardizing way of speaking about God for the purpose of Christian unity within a growing religious movement.  The claim is that the Trinity arrived at an explicit explication in the words and traditions of Jesus even while it was implicit from the beginning.  God the Father created by speaking the eternal Word Christ as the Holy Spirit moved over the face of the abyss to make things become.

Aphorism of the Day, May 20, 2024

Language is the personal field in which we live because language is the expression of connection of relationship through which we are defined as personal.  Is it any surprise then that God as that which none greater can be conceived would include ultimate personalities?

Aphorism of the Day, May 19, 2024

Pentecost is a language day.  Christ as the Eternal Word was translated into every language.  The Christ image of God on each person rises within people of every language.

Aphorism of the Day, May 18, 2024

Once one accepts the mediation of all experience through language, whether consciously or unconsciously, the notion of the spontaneous must get reassessed because everything happens through a pre-existing interpretive grid.

Aphorism of the Day, May 17, 2024

Language is the built axiology of humanity in continuously assigning value from human contexts.  It is a system of privileging metaphorical ways of speaking about everything.

Aphorism of the Day, May 16, 2024

A mystery in life is how sentient beings have mutual experience of each other conducted.  Is it empty space between you and me or is it space which conducts sensorial experience.  Is Holy Spirit omnipresence a name we give the mystery of being able to mutually connect at all?

Aphorism of the Day, May 15, 2024

Holy Spirit in language becomes the personification of the metaphors of wind or breath, which for the ancients was the hidden sign of life within a person or nature.

Aphorism of the Day, May 14, 2024

Can we know the specific effects of everything that is and was on everything else that is and was?  There is two much negligible to deal with, and yet practically we have deal with statistical approximations of what our five senses tell us.

Aphorism of the Day, May 13, 2024

The mystery of Spirit: how does the quantities of all possible entities fit into the quantity of ONE?

Aphorism of the Day, May 12, 2024

The Ascension of Jesus might be metaphorical understood as the historical Jesus being expanded to being poetically declared by Paul as the Christ who is all and in all.  The Ascension might be insightfully understood as an expansive diffusion of understanding personal Christliness as accessing the image of God upon everything.

Aphorism of the Day, May 11, 2024

Oneness with God is not the equality of exact coincidence with God; it is is the equality of difference of living and having our becoming within God.  The continual goal is to accept the unity of being within God rather than forgetfully living a life of alienation.

Aphorism of the Day, May 10, 2024

The New Testament writing come to be generated long after Jesus has become invisible.  The writers start with their own reality of their experience of the Risen Christ, and present a program of the phases of Jesus Christ, stretching from the prehistorical Word from the beginning through his return to the invisible after earthly life state of being beyond the elevator of the Ascension.

Aphorism of the Day, May 9, 2024 (Ascension Day)

Ascension and Assumptions are presentations of the belief of specific memorable transitions of persons between the visible and invisible words.  This belief includes the connection between the lifetimes of the departed persons with the remaining memorial traces of that person as continuing inspiration for humanity in need of superlative exemplars to guide our quest for surpassability in excellence.  Each person makes a transition to the invisible and the goal of a good transition would be to leave some memorial traces worthy to inspire courage in excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, May 8, 2024

The similarity between checkers and chess is the same board on which they are played.  Language is the game board of human life on which many games of discursive practices are played, each with rules pertaining to their own "game." 

Aphorism of the Day, May 7, 2024

Within the main paradigm of human life, having language, there are many different paradigms or language games.   Like Venn diagrams, when language users experience the expanding of the flooding or mutual areas of different paradigms, the experience of ironies, contradictions, and ambiguities arises.  How does one live in the "scientific empirical verification" paradigm and the biblical writings at the same time.  The failure to know how to be scientists and poets at the same time and confusing discursive practices has caused much confusion.  Persons confuse by trying to be scientifically poetic or poetically scientific.

Aphorism of the Day, May 6, 2024

Anachronism occur when referring to the past because we can't be there and we project the paradigms of our "now" onto the understanding and presentations of the past.

Aphorism of the Day, May 5, 2024

Today is different any other other day because it has never been before even while it retains in our experience similar traces of what has gone before.  These traces have to be reapplied with invention for what new must arise in response to what is new.

Aphorism of the Day, May 4, 2024

Today we re-contextualize every memorial traces that lingers from yesterday and depending upon the goals which we have for today and the future, we use the traces variously.  Imagine the great expanding Plenitude re-contextualizing everything and always already including the absolute past which comprising a new NOW.

Aphorism of the Day, May 3, 2024

In John's Gospel, the notion of friends has a special meaning.  It refers perhaps to the affinity and fondness which members of the community shared because of their confession of an experience of the Risen Christ.  Such friendship was a reference to "fellowship" love.

Aphorism of the Day, May 2, 2024

In saying or writing, one cannot control the perceived meanings of others about what one writes or says.  We are fortunate if the meanings received are within an area of commonality to allow us to live together.

Aphorism of the Day, May 1, 2024

Laying down one's life for one's friends is an expression of love.  The Gospel of John uses the Greek word pseuche or "soul life" for life.  When we make room for each other to live together effectively, laying down one's soul life is a constant requirement.