Aphorism of the Day, April 2023

Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2023

A shepherd was a symbol of leadership in ancient Israel since leaders had more resources to "manipulate" the more dependent masses.  If leaders today have more money and resources to "manipulate" the masses who are deprived of the same, good shepherd leadership does not exploit those who are weaker, less informed, and poorer.

Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2023

Taking advantage of one's strengths and assets to exploit for personal gain is the exact counter to what being a good shepherd means.

Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2023

If Jesus spoke in "figures of speech," then the Gospel writers want the readers to appreciate the differences in discursive practices, meaning the words are not an exact mirror reflection of the realities to which words are referring.  Understanding meaningful signification of a text is always an issue.

Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2023

The message of the metaphor of the Good Shepherd is to be a shepherd for the vulnerable.  If one is given ownership, power, wealth, and knowledge then those should be used to care for those who need it.

Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2023

Every metaphor has its signifying limitation and may deconstruct when expansive literalness is applied.  For example, the Lord is my shepherd, or Jesus as the Good Shepherd.  What is a shepherd's relationship to his sheep?  He owns the sheep and feeds and cares for the sheep in order to get food, wool, and milk products.  The ownership of sheep is essentially exploitive, with a sheep being a commodified animal.  Our view of God or Jesus would not want to tap the exploitive aspect of what shepherding means, so we limit the metaphor to God and Jesus caring for us like a favorite pet.

Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2023

Writings are made in specific times and places in language that is best known and interpreted within the specific times and places.  What happens when language contexts are no longer accessible to later readers of ancient words?  Can anyone claim to understand the meanings of ancient text as though meanings were "self-evidential" over time?

Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2023

The presentation of Jesus as the good shepherd is chiefly supported by the confessing words, "I lay down my life for the sheep."  Is any farm commodity worth the life of a worker, if threatened?  As a figure of speech, it refers to human leadership sacrificing life for followers.  This is counter to the norm of the people sacrificing their lives for the leader.  What CEO says, "I will give up my privileges and bonuses for the employees?"

Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2023

Resurrection is a poetry of the future.

Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2023

Faith is hoping the assessments of the future will make sense of the bafflements of the present.

Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2023

Present disappoint might be expressed in the phrase, "we had hoped that..."  Outcomes often reveal that we have had the wrong vision of what we hoped for or the wrong timing for when they might happen, or the wrong notions about how they might happen.  We live by the insight, "The future will give clarity to the past and to what is happening now."

Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2023

Serendipity is when something "random" gets experienced as favorable and blessed timing of something good happening to us.  Serendipity and surprise go together because one can't plan one's own serendipity.  What is often called a theophany is serendipitous.  If we can't plan theophanies, what does that tell us about the apparentness of God to each human being?  Most of life involves having faith while living with the general apparentness of God without all the thunderbolts and light shows.

Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2023

Like a light switch the Risen Christ could turn on or turn off his appearance.  He turned on his appearance suddenly in the breaking of the bread with the Emmaus road walkers.  Could this be a metaphorical story about Eucharistic presence?  The Gospel invites us to read with "inner eyes," poetic eyes.

Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2023

The resurrection is the explanation for the many reappearances of Christ after the death of Jesus.  Jesus became a rhetorical and poetic expansive feeling phrase of "Christ as all and in all."  Such a phrase is meant to proclaim divine personal omnipresence or divine immanence.

Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2023

The Bible as any text is "re-written" every time it is read because it becomes variation of meaning according to the version of the reader who have unique linguistic programming.

Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2023

Doubting is a good exercise to help us continual pan interpretative framework to find what is appropriate for the textual situation.

Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2023

The mysteries expressed by religious discourse thwart science proving that religion and science employ different discourses with different truth purposes.  The problem happens when religionists assert that the events of their poetry could have been empirically verified.  The scientists rightly say, "Stick to your mysticism."

Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2023

The so called "Doubting Thomas" story is really a wisdom parable to shed light on the blessedness, the validity, equality, and the affirmation of a wide variety of experiences of the Risen Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2023

Empirical verification or sensorial experience is the standard for to indicating something is really real.  And stories about such in the Gospels are a way of establishing the really "realness" of inward experience.  Just as Thomas saw and touched, so too those who did not see and touch had a really real encounter with the Risen Christ.  One's inward life is as true as one's outward life but in substantially different ways.  People of faith can be honest scientists.

Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2023

One of the subtle results of institutional religion is to assume that the presences of Christ can be limited to the administrative prerogatives of the leadership.

Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2023

In the "doubting Thomas" story, the writer of John's Gospel is claiming that modes of knowing the Risen Christ are blessed and equal in faith and truth status to eyewitness encounters with Jesus.  The post-death of Jesus encounters with the Risen Christ in various modes are the new norms.

Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2023

What role did grief play in bringing the apparitional appearances of Christ to his disciples?  Can extraordinary grief command extraordinary appearances?

Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2023

On Easter we ponder personal continuity beyond death.  Does the "software" of our inside stuff of self consciousness continue to function without the "hardware" of our bodies?

Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2023

The Sabbath rest of Jesus in Holy Week is the time that his body resided in the tomb and there is speculation about where the spirit of Jesus went when "separated" from his body.  The bringing to language of what really is unknowable and mysterious is the creative use of words to produce hope and the undeniability of the future.

Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2023

God's greatest attribute may be also how divine weakness manifests itself locally.  God is omnipresent Freedom and Great Freedom shares lesser freedom everywhere and does not interfere with it locally.  Why? True moral worth happens because of when occasions are not coerced.  Great freedom is weak when shared with local freedom as in an individual not wanting to choose to manifest the lure of love which rides upon Great Freedom.

Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2023

Rituals can lose their anthropological soundness when they become religious acts to simply follow rules.  The Maundy Thursday ritual highlights two crucial aspect for the survival of community: Eating and service.  We should not isolate Jesus as living bread from actual bread which gives people physical survival and eating together is a way of guaranteeing that each has enough to eat.

Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2023

Holy Week and Easter are the communal ways to deal with the reality of death and after-death.  Death is the brute reality of life.  Post-death resurrection is a discourse of hope for the unknown not yet.  Death is the failure to preserve the quality of life as we have known it.  We project an afterlife Preserver of the continuity of personal identity, not because we egotistically think that any of us deserves everlasting existence, but because any becoming is an absolute becoming in having happened, and having been absolute in having happened, such absoluteness can never be erased.  People can never be said to not having happened.

Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2023

In Holy Week we grapple with what Continuity means.  We get mixed signals; we're supposed to love life but not to the point of not being able to adjust when life is lost.  Continuity remains in life and death but we don't have the contemporaneous witness of the dead to have their views of the role of being dead within Continuity.  Death experienced as not have familiar access to someone has given birth the creative imaginations of the afterlife.  At death a person leaves the discourse of science and empirical verification regarding their "not in their body" becoming; about the afterlife one can only use artistic discourses of creative imagination.  When we speak about the afterlife, it is always translated into "this life" language and experience.

Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2023

Holy Week is the strategy of calendar time in the annual Christian curriculum used to build community identity with Christ through the corporate remembering of the root events of the Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2023

The liturgical juxtaposition of the Palm Procession and the Passion Gospel highlights the crowds that one might belong to when viewing Jesus.  A Jerusalem crowd might be threatened by Jesus because the Romans building projects where providing employment in the city.  The outsiders from Galilee could come to town and put their hero on a donkey in a parade and threaten the tenuous relationship between the city's religious leaders and the Roman occupiers.

Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2023

St. Paul wrote about "glorying in the cross of Christ," and one can wonder if this is like trying to put lipstick on an ugly pig.  How could death become a necessary absence of Jesus in order for endless number of people to have experiences of the presences of the Risen Christ?  A "functional" resurrection seems to have happened only for Jesus and his followers; for us we don't have immediate post-resurrection experiences with our faithful departed loved ones, not unless we have our imaginations on apparitional overload.  In Christian lore, the death of Jesus is one-of-a-kind and the deaths of our loved ones are also unique but don't seem to have the same redemptive meanings as we inconsolably miss them even with gratitude for them having been in our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, March 2023

Aphorism of the Day, March 31, 2023

St. Paul made the death of Jesus into a mystical event of identity with the death of Jesus in becoming an ironic power to die to one's selfish self.

Aphorism of the Day, March 30, 2023

St. Paul seems more hopeful about Judaism being united by the acceptance of Christ.  He wrote that the Gentiles received grace to make the Jews jealous.  By the later times when the Gospels were written, it seems as though the divisions within Judaism had become more deeply set

Aphorism of the Day, March 29, 2023

The presence of the Passion accounts in the Gospel is proof of the antipathy that had developed between parties of Judaism.  It involves a rather ironic message.  Those who were complicit in the lead up to the crucifixion were those who did not know they were setting up the climax, namely, the resurrection appearances.  So if one's sins are overcome by some subsequent and necessary good it leads to the guilty by ignorance plea and the absolution, "Father, forgiven them for they do not know what they do."  Was the Passion written in part to present the insight: "You can't plea ignorance anymore?"

Aphorism of the Day, March 28, 2023

Palm Sunday and The Sunday of the Passion includes insights about the break down between parties within Judaism, the followers of Jesus and the parties who held positions with the Sanhedrin or the leadership group which negotiated with the Roman authorities.  The implication is that the Sanhedrin were complicit with the Romans in trying to crush Jesus and his followers.  The political truth is that the Roman authorities acted in their own interest.

Aphorism of the Day, March 27, 2023

Jesus is perhaps the greatest "post-life savant" of all time.  Which other person of history can have so many people claim having with them a personal relationship?  Yes, many Buddhists will speak about realizing the Buddha nature within themselves, but does that characterization have the same "personal" overtones as those who claim  relationship with Jesus?

Aphorism of the Day, March 26, 2023

When one writes about the past, one is super-imposing the present on the past, presenting a present version of the past.   The Gospels super-impose what was happening decades after Jesus upon a narrative Jesus.  The sub-text involves the dynamics of the communities which were responsible for the writing.

Aphorism of the Day, March 25, 2023

Might be good to link image of the divine upon life with resurrection life.  The image of the divine is what propels the eternal return of the same or traces with surpassing differences.  Resurrection life should be seen as something impossible, namely static life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 24, 2023

Life and death are continuously juxtaposed in the mysticism of St. Paul.  They become metaphors for identifying with the life, death, and "re-life" of Jesus as the path of spiritual transformation.  The Lazarus story is a way to proclaim an identity with Christ while "dead in sins."  Lazarus is symbolic of the two resurrections, namely, the experience of resurrection life before we finally die, and the resurrection to come in our "re-life."

Aphorism of the Day, March 23, 2023

Lazarus the resurrected one, came back to life, only to die again.  Or is Lazarus a figurative one in a parable of Jesus told by the early Jesus Movement of the continuity of resurrection life that is present in all through God's omnipresence and made manifest with the Risen Christ known to be present in the lives of people who will die even while having resurrection life.

Aphorism of the Day, March 22, 2023

The Lazarus story emphasizes the resurrection is not a last day event but the experience of a new quality of life while we live.

Aphorism of the Day, March 21, 2023

The disciples and interlocutors of Jesus in John's Gospel are often presented as literalists who don't understand the use of figurative language.  From the first word of John's Gospel, the writer is writing about Word and coming to nuanced use of language in perceiving "inner" meanings is one of John's writing goals.

Aphorism of the Day, March 20, 2023

The Lazarus story encodes the teaching that while people are dead in sin, they can received the resurrected life of the Holy Spirit through the words of Christ.

Aphorism of the Day, March 19, 2023

The Gospels were written years after the first writing of St. Paul.  One can read them as manual wherein the reader puts oneself in identity with the disciples who are initially trapped in literal/plain understanding and being gradually trained in the "inner meaning" of things such as the meanings which Paul had from his mystical experiences.

 Aphorism of the Day, March 18, 2023

We see what we see and are "blind" to what we don't yet see and such seeing and blindness differences among people most often accounts for the conflicts between them.  Seeing and blindness are relative to ego construction based upon one's contexts and this involves education, cultural conditioning, and one's age and exposure to informational sources.  We can project a perfect outside arbiter for "correct or enlightened" seeing but whoever delivers such a perfect message colors the message by being an imperfect seer.

Aphorism of the Day, March 17, 2023

Why do people who live in the same religious milieu disagree, and sometimes profoundly?  People belong to different paradigms or reside in different hermeneutic circles.  This means people can use the same words and yet do not share the same meanings of those words.  How does one move from on paradigm to the next? Conversion.  One is blind to the insights of another paradigm until one has a seeing conversion experience.  The Jesus Movement was another hermeneutical circles in first century Judaism.  Not ever member of the Jewish society could embrace the features which came to define the Jesus Movement.

Aphorism of the March 16, 2023

The future fruition may be the answer to past causation questions, like, why are there seeds?  So that they can become trees.  Why are people unenlightened or blind?  So that they can come to see and be enlightened.

Aphorism of the Day, March 15, 2023

Blindness and sight are the metaphors used by the writer of John channelling the mind of Christ, to describe why persons in a former paradigm cannot "see" the wisdom of the new paradigm.  Nicodemus was a Pharisee of a former paradigm who was coming to "see" the wisdom of the Christ paradigm.

Aphorism of the Day, March 14, 2023

Biblically, looking only on "outward" appearances is called in the words of Jesus, "blindness," while looking and seeing inwardness virtues of gentleness, kindness, and pure motives is what the words of Jesus calls "seeing."  Literalism is blindness regarding the Scriptures and it assumes that writers did not know the difference between common sense naive realism and artistic presentations with langauge.

Aphorism of the Day, March 13, 2023

The inner languaged person can be multiverses with access to one's conscious life in actual time.  Such a realm of possibilisms can be a legion which is both a resource for creativity and the instincts for acting out wrongly.  The conscious life as being an ego orchestrator of one's multiverses calls each of us to enlightened insightful wise agency.  Such wisdom would include kindly acting with other people.

Aphorism of the Day, March 12, 2023

In the beginning was the Word.  John's Gospel tells us that human life distinctively is known because we are worded beings.  Without words, nothing that is known could have been known.

Aphorism of the Day, March 11, 2023

In John's Gospel the physical or plain meaning is often the set up for the words of Jesus to relate the inward meaning.  The literal water of Jacob's well set up the living water phrases.  The disciples' reference to food to eat is the set up for Jesus to say, "I have food to eat that you do not know about."

Aphorism of the Day, March 10, 2023

One of the subtexts of the Gospel of John is this: Don't read it literally, because the physical is but a metaphor for the spiritual.

Aphorism of the Day, March 9, 2023

How is it that one might understand biblical words different at the age of 70 than one did at 16?  Could it be that learning and insights involve continuous conversion to new interpretative paradigms?  But aren't the words the same?  Or does time reduce words to but traces that have new meanings in time?

Aphorism of the Day, March 8, 2023

Should we worry about the Mystery of all that is negligible in causing the events of our life?  What we don't and can't know isn't relevant?  Or should we remain humble about what we don't yet know?

Aphorism of the Day, March 7, 2023

The Samaritan woman at the well spoke about a messiah to Jesus.  Since the Samaritans only had their version of the Torah, which is pre-Davidic, who is the messiah of the Torah?  Is it the prophet who would be raised up?  In the development of ideas one wonders how the notion of messiah was wedded with the notion of a future prophet in Torah.

Aphorism of the Day, March 6, 2023

One of the reading cues of John's Gospel is the cryptic presentation of non-literal reading as indicative of being spiritual or born from above.  Non-literal understanding of life does not eschew the empirical verification of science, it is but a complementing truth of how to be related to the fullness of reality.

Aphorism of the Day, March 5, 2023

The writer of the Gospel of John unifies the faith or works debates by citing words of Jesus saying, "this is work, that you believe, i.e. have faith.  If having faith in the right object, i.e., the redeeming work of Christ, is the Christ appointed work, then faith and work are united.  A rather interesting twist on the issue since Paul is seen as making such a stark distinction between the two.

Aphorism of the Day, March 4, 2023

From the words of Jesus, Bible readers have come to stereotypically shame the Pharisees as being those who act religious on the outside but when the cameras are turned off, behave differently.  This, of course, could be any of us.  However, the only three Pharisees who are named in the New Testament, actually get good reviews: Nicodemus, Gamaliel, and Paul.

Aphorism of the Day, March 3, 2023

One of the collateral military effects of reading the Bible is the model of people who heard God telling them that they have been given land that they did not previously possess.  "I'm taking your land because God told me too."

Aphorism of the Day, March 2, 2023

The writer of John's Gospel presents the contrast between earthly things and heavenly things.  The heavenly things in a practical sense referred to seeing from having been converted to a new paradigm of thinking.  The new thinking was thinking which surpassed the thinking of how previously the faith life was to be interpreted.

Aphorism of the Day, March 1, 2023

An important way to read the Gospel of John is to note the scorning words of Jesus about literalism, eg. how can I an old man get back into my mother's womb, and Lazarus' sleep good, or that he is dead.  The Gospel of John does not invite us to the language of empirical verification  but the artistic language of poetic and moving spirituality.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2023

Aphorism of the Day, February 28, 2023

The Gospel of John contrast heavenly things and earthly things.  Earthly things refers to literalism while heavenly things refers to spiritual or the inward interpretation of what life means.

Aphorism of the Day, February 27, 2023

Some use the religious laws and recommended behaviors as a success and blessing formula.  If you do such and such, then God will bless you with wealth, success and happiness.  This simplistic formulaic method often proves wrong, especially because lots of bad things happen to good people.  Why not regard lawful living as simply good actuarial living.  In wise observation of probable outcomes, choose the statistically safer way of living.  Live toward probable likelihood, not in stubborn certitude about things which one cannot guarantee.

Aphorism of the Day, February 26, 2023

It is a mystery to ponder how such an account the temptation of Jesus would be relayed so as to be part of the reading public.  It assumes that Jesus told a person who would orally transmit it so that it could eventually become text.  And this text was not included in John's Gospel.  It is the writer presentation of Jesus as the Second Adam, returning to the garden degraded into a wild place, and there the Second Adam resists the serpent to redeem First Adam's failure to do so.

Aphorism of the Day, February 25, 2023

Before Jesus became a public minister, he is presented as having done his inner work.  Jesus was a people whisperer, because he had tamed the inward forces which tempt toward megalomania, exhibitionism, and even suicidal dying before one's time.  His inward conquest is presented in the temptation in the wilderness.

Aphorism of the Day, February 24, 2023

Would Jesus today be characterized as someone with the abnormality of "savant syndrome?"  In his encounter with the devil, Jesus is presented as one who could change stones to bread, jump off high places and not get hurt, and possess all the kingdoms of the world.  Jesus was humanly abnormal, not the average bloke in terms of abilities.  What made Jesus "normal" was that he was for others in connecting with people.  He was supremely gifted and the way that he was gifted does not have the pathological pejorative that the modern "savant" designation has.  His gifts were integrated with humanity for the common good.   Yes, he was alone and unique in his gifts but thoroughly integrated with humanity in his sharing of the same.

Aphorism of the Day, February 23, 2023

Jesus as the second Adam of early church retraces first Adam's confrontation with the serpent, only no longer in Eden but in a very wild threatening place, within and without.  Second Adam Jesus, was known to be hero Jesus in this encounter and initiate a new spiritual community, a new creation of how to be human going forward.

Aphorism of the Day, February 22, 2024

Ash Wednesday, day of macabre face painting or a day of remembering to cherish and care for our lives in our bodies before they return to dust?

Aphorism of the Day, February 21, 2023

The commercialization of Shrove Tuesday?  Carnivale and Mardi Gras celebrations are such public rituals of excess as if to enhance the fasting of Lent with its most extreme opposite.  Is the self control of moderation too boring?

Aphorism of the Day, February 20, 2023

Israel faced their 40 years of temptation with many failures.  Jesus went through his 40 days of testing and passed.  Jesus is the representative of God's solidarity with the human condition of probability.  Humans are continuously tested in many ways by the freedom of probability condition including the interior conditions of being tempted to do things at the wrong time and for the wrong reason.

Aphorism of the Day, February 19, 2023

The past is the only reservoir that we have to speak about what is new in the present.  Life is a continual process of comparing the past with the present.

Aphorism of the Day, February 18, 2023

Everything which is not unknowingly used by me in interpreting the present might be considered negligible.  And it remains a mystery regarding the negligible pertinent factors missed in my interpretation.  The great Negligible is what is mysterious to humanity.  We cannot designate specific causation to what we don't know.  But we can assume that much of what we don't know influences our situation.

Aphorism of the Day, February 17, 2023

Elevation, light, and clouds were landscape metaphors for speaking about interior events of epiphany with heighten closeness to the divine, seeing with wisdom, while living in the cloud of mystery signifying the humility of very limited human capacity in face of All.

Aphorism of the Day, February 16, 2023

How should people practice living together if all diverse ideological parties realize that there will never be conversion to one view by all?  Can there be a faith in the common good beyond parochial interests?

Aphorism of the Day, February 15, 2023

The transfiguration stories follow the tradition of how to communicate the Superlative in how the writers within the Christ communities felt about Jesus.  The New Testament is in fact a book of superlatives about Jesus.

Aphorism of the Day, February 14, 2023

What is the metaphorical difference of light in the ancient world that did not have but fire as a way of artificially creating light during darkness, from the metaphor of light today when we light up the night to avoid darkness?  Light still functions as what is needed to see, and using the metaphor of Christ as light, the nuance is about how we see.  Mere physical seeing is not enough; we must see through orientation to love and justice, for enlightenment to be more than merely physical sight.

Aphorism of the Day, February 13, 2023

The shiny face of Jesus on the Mount of the Transfiguration is the reuse of the Moses story motif whose face shone on Mount Sinai.  This motif is used to proclaim that Jesus is a God-ordained human like Moses but surpassing him in time and superlative significance for those who had come under his spell.

Aphorism of the Day, February 12, 2023

The beatitudes promote the requirement that the inward life of thoughts, dreams, and emotion be completely pure and so everyone is disqualified from the presumption of perfection.

Aphorism of the Day, February 11, 2023

Paul rebuked his Corinthian leaders for identifying themselves with their leaders.  Religious party identity seems to be the history of Christianity where ironically Christians are divided by having a "common" savior?

Aphorism of the Day, February 10, 2023

The words of the beatitude reveal the impossibility of getting outer action and inner self in agreement.  People can to right things for wrong reasons and motives.  People can do really lawful things and yet inside not want to do them.  If perfect is always doing the right thing for the right and pure motive then everyone is left needing a "clean heart."

Aphorism of the Day, February 9, 2023

Fulfilling the law in the words of Jesus seems to mean that right doing has to be accompanied by right "inner being."  You haven't murdered?  Have you been angry and desired to harm someone?  Gotcha!  Right being is the inward sphere and only the person knows about the inwardly secret life.  Fulfilling the law means discovering that one never can and so one needs the fulfillment of the grace of forgiveness.

Aphorism of the Day, February 8, 2023

Why would an imaginary past be written, one consisting of examples of things happening which violate the laws of nature?  To spin an heroic past of how people survived serves the providence of the present when the tales are told.  Divine Fate must have intervened heroically for our survival.

Aphorism of the Day, February 7, 2023

Let your "yes" be "yes," and your "no" be "no."  Does such a binary allow for any growth over time when one's future state surpasses and contradicts one earlier unenlightenment?  It probably means that one's oral contracts should be honored, i.e., do what you say you're going to do.

Aphorism of the Day, February 6, 2023

Is hating one's brother different from killing one's brother?  Of course it is in the jurisprudence practice of society.  A deed is the telling thing which gets one convicted, not the inward feeling of hatred.  What about in the sphere of inner or spiritual perfection?  One can be proud about not murdering anyone while harboring continuing hatred.  This disjunction was cited by the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes reminding us that we cannot exempt our inner lives from the higher spiritual laws in our quest for transformation in excellence.

Aphorism of the Day, February 5, 2023

Although the words of Jesus indicate that he did not come to abolish the law, but fulfill it, that fulfillment was more than having the outer appearances of abiding by society's rules.  The inner life of the one keeping rules also had to comport with the rules, and this is a much more difficult hidden dilemma.

Aphorism of the Day, February 4, 2023

What does humanity do with the great Negligible?  The Great Negligible being everything which might have existed, does, and will exists for which there is no human experience and yet co-exists with human experience.  What give human beings the right to speak with any certain knowledge about the vast unexperienced reality of All?  Whether we have the right to do so or not, the history is that people speak poetically about the Plenitude within which we find ourselves and such Plenitude has attained the Personal term of God, because humans find the personhood is what is highest about ourselves, and so the great One, as a very minimal aspect of greatness is regarded as Personal.

Aphorism of the Day, February 3, 2023

How does one harmonize the words of Jesus about not abolishing the law and the prophets with Paul's provision that Gentile not required to keep purity laws.  It indicates the diversity of Christ-centered Judaism in the first century.

Aphorism of the Day, February 2, 2023

Reading the Bible with hermeneutical charity means that one accepts the contexts of the writers, even citing the practices of slavery and subjugation of women.  However, one does not give up the advances that have been made in the applied justice to more people in our time and one must criticize harshly the use of biblical cultural practices to justify practice of injustice and inequity in our lives today.

Aphorism of the Day, February 1, 2023

Light is a metaphor discovery which changes one's life for the better.  The sun is always shining but we don't see it at night.  Light has to be refreshed in its contrast with darkness.  In life process, light events need to occur as continuous insights since no singular seeing event is final.

Aphorism of the Day, January 2023

Aphorism of the Day, January 31, 2023

How would the laws of the Torah be like scientific laws?  A scientific law is tentative until a better explanation comes about.  A scientific law is relative to the context of observation and observer and when those change things once negligible become a new part of the defining context.  The laws of the Torah can be seen as contextual and of constant need for application in future time of new contexts and this means a law is always in need of better fulfillment in time.   What is always abolished is the past time of a law; what is needed is new fulfillment in new application.  This mean that law is a process of on-going fulfillment.  Jesus was not abolishing the past of the law in time by denying how it had functioned, he was looking at new fulfillment in his time and in the future.

Aphorism of the Day, January 30, 2023

Jesus told people without social power to be "salt" and "light" within their situation.  This implies people without status can still influence their environment toward exalted values.  What does "salt" and "light" behaviors mean for people who have social power?  It should mean justice for all.

Aphorism of the Day, January 29, 2023

Probably more people would be Christian if they saw more people living the beatitudes.

Aphorism of the Day, January 28, 2023

If the beatitudes pertain mainly to oppressed peoples, how can Christians who have the status of being "Empire Christians" accessed the meaning of the beatitudes?  Only by freeing the oppressed and ending the conditions of inequity, discrimination, and persecution.

Aphorism of the Day, January 27, 2023

The beatitudes of Jesus might seem to be servile living to placate oppressors and bend to their power.  On the other hand, they might be realistic, survival, non-violent, martial arts to demonstrate inner strength of another order.

Aphorism of the Day, January 26, 2023

How do meek persons inherit the earth?  Could be that they know that the creator gives everything to everyone all of the time even though human capacity only allows everything to be known in piecemeal.  The meek perhaps believe in owning alll that has come before and all that comes after because they've read the Will of the Divine.  Meekness is based upon the humility of knowing one's continuing limited capacity in processing the Great Gift in time.

Aphorism of the Day, January 25, 2023

According to Micah, God's requirements are to do justice, love kindness/mercy, and walk humbly before God.  The beatitudes are a further explication of this requirement and imply that we have these requirements even when we are not receiving justice, kindness, and when others are not walking humbly before God.  The requirements of the righteous oppressed seemed to be greater than those for the oppressors.  The rule is not to return evil for evil.  The faith standard is higher than a juridical standard which requires that evil be punished in this life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 24, 2023

Ponder the church in situations where living the beatitudes was not required because so-called Christian nations were subjugating and persecuting indigenous people. What an irony?  So called Christian people subjugate others and force them to live the beatitudes.  American slaves had to live the beatitudes to survive their "christian" masters?

Aphorism of the Day, January 23, 2023

Nietzsche could regard the beatitudes as a "transvaluation" of the values generated by the Will to Power.  Beatitude "power" is the power of peaceful resistance that expresses Christly martial arts for persons without political power.

Aphorism of the Day, January 22, 2023

In the present, we can only draw from all of the words of our lives, products of speech, writing, and acted scripts, and seek new word products, neologisms, whose inventiveness should be judged by whether we progress in love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 21, 2023

What is the difference between replication of scientific experiences which support a "law" of science, and the kind of replication which happens when different people at different time and different ways have an experience of the sublime while listening to classical music.  Or when people at different times and different ways have religious or mystical experience.  Both kinds of replication happen; but they are substantial different kinds of how traces of the past are re-presented in the present.  Experiences of the sublime are not precisely replicated and partake of too many elements of contextual diversity.  They do not submit to the limits of the conditions like when water consistently boiling at 212 degrees at sea level.

Aphorism of the Day, January 20, 2023

Biblical studies is trying to create the contexts for when the words were written with imagination because one is so far removed from the actual contexts and the words on the page cannot really be the original situation.  When the words refer to things which cannot be empirically verified, it is a sign to know that the writers were not using language of empirical verification.

Aphorism of the Day, January 19, 2023

It often seems like the Gospel truths of Jesus are reduced to administrative truths for various religious bodies to build their identity and support their institutions and what may be lost is the promotion love and justice in our various settings.

Aphorism of the Day, January 18, 2023

The most basic message of Jesus was about the nearness of God's realm.  In Jesus, God's realm was made apparent even because humanity lives often with the realm of God being inapparent.

Aphorism of the Day, January 17, 2023

What might the metaphor, "I will make you fish for people," mean?   It could mean Christ as a charisma coach helping one to activate one's charisma so that one is  winsome with people toward the higher values of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 16, 2023

The life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was an epiphany for America.  He shown light on the banality of  American treatment of Blacks but he did so by calling all people to the better angels of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 15, 2023

One whose name means "lover of horses" and who never has spent time around horses might be misnamed.  There is often a disjunction between a reductive name and the actual occasions of becoming in one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 14, 2023

The question of the priority of becoming over being is also seen in the disjunction between being a Christian and doing Christ-like behaviors.  We are too quick to rely on our verbal identity of being Christian rather than the on-going occasions of becoming Christ-like in our actual behaviors.

Aphorism of the Day, January 13, 2022

An aspect of epiphany is often referred to as a "call."  It is a significant epiphany to find what one is supposed to do with one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 12, 2023

THE Epiphany is the informational overload of All confronting us always already.  THE Epiphany needs to be parsed into many epiphany as we trek toward greater adequacy in living together well.

Aphorism of the Day, January 11, 2023

Not having the capacity for comprehending all, seek but greater adequacy with the knowledge we have today as that adequacy is tuned in the direction of love and justice for all.

Aphorism of the Day, January 10, 2023

The writings of the Bible were most relevant in the times and contexts when and where they were composed.  As texts in different times, they are endlessly interpreted because no reading and no interpretation comes with self-evidential meanings implied.

Aphorism of the Day, January 9, 2023

Epiphany can mean an occasion of coming to be persuaded by new knowledge such that one changes the direction of one's life.

Aphorism of the Day, January 8, 2023

Jesus conformed to the ritual processes inherited in his setting and to an innovation of water purification associated with John the Baptist.  The ritual solidarity of Jesus with humanity is a feature of how God is with us in our identity rites.

Aphorism of the Day, January 7, 2023

The meaning of the Epiphany is a reminder that God in Christ is manifest to everyone.  It is like a re-surfacing in the human person of God's omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, January 6, 2023

Jesus is the very intensified particular manifestation of God to all to remind us that God is manifestly in general divine omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, January 5, 2023

Once the rituals of the church become more about the celebrants than those in the ritual process, the anthropological soundness of the sacraments are lost.  If sacraments are done for the church hierarchy rather than the incorporation of people into community, administration has triumphed over actual care of people.

Aphorism of the Day, January 4, 2023

Biblical literature includes lots of positive predications about people most of which never occur.  Positive thinking discourse for setting faith attitudes is a strategy for surviving by living in hopeful ways.  The task of living is to reconcile being hopeful with living with actuarial probabilities.

Aphorism of the Day, January 3, 2023

What is sanctified fame called?  An epiphany.  Good fame is when what is popularly promulgates aids us toward our better angels.  The Epiphany is about the Christ event becoming known.

Aphorism of the Day, January 2, 2023

A birth is contextual; it is most relevant to parents and family.  Jesus is firstly to and for Joseph and Mary.  A birth is also social; a child eventual belongs to more than parents and family.  The Gospels promote Jesus as the one who belonged to the entire world as a sign of God being with us.  And now we are supposed to be signs of God being with the world in the telling ways of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, January 1, 2023

Naming follows the function of language which is to reductively abstract from the many occasions of becoming to a single identifying name to assert the oneness of unity across the continuity of differences in time. 

Aphorism of the Day, December 2022

Aphorism of the Day, December 31, 2022

A last calendar day; an artificial way of defining time as our futile efforts of controlling the stream of time which is continuous and has no such divisions except the story divisions which humans give it.  A calendar is a way of trying to give human meaning to the time of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 30, 2022

The rationale of names in the Bible is to connect event or meaning of life within a name.  Jesus, or Jeshua, or Joshua, means the Lord is Salvation.  Salvation refers to the holistic health for the peoples of the earth and includes "afterlife" health as a complement for what doesn't quite attain full health in this life.

Aphorism of the Day, December 29, 2022

A name of a person is a most holy reduction.  All of the continuous states of becoming past, present, and future are reduced to a single name.   This abstraction from the states of becoming is indeed a reduction but it is holy in that it celebrate the continuity of identity through all the states of becoming.  But such reduction should not transgressed the rich varied differences in the states of becoming within a "unified" continuous individual.  The name Jesus was given on his eighth day even though later would confess Christ as all and in all.  This is indeed a pleroma of designated states of becoming.

Aphorism of the Day, December 28, 2022

The Feast of the Holy Innocent is a reminder that children and the vulnerable become the collateral victims of adult tyrants and very bad adult policies, like our lack of reasonable gun laws.

Aphorism of the Day, December 27, 2022

Trying to escape being a language user is impossible because any attempt already presumes the use of language or already being ordered by it.  Word made flesh means that word and material are co-extensive in human experience.

Aphorism of the Day, December 26, 2022

One of the names of Christ is Word from the Beginning who is God.  It is appropriate that God and Word are co-extensive since word is what is more humanly unavoidably valued.  The reflexive irony is that we cannot even speak about Word without the prior assumption of Word.  Try to imagine anything without first assuming prior word ability.

Aphorism of the Day, December 25, 2022

The incarnation is a particular divine immanence to announce the always already reality of divine omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 24, 2022

The Christmas Story: what is unbelievable through the lens of empirical verification is believable through the lens of literary criticism which locates the artistic purpose of the story to encode the undeniable Sublime.

Aphorism of the Day, December 23, 2022

The greatest error in religion is when people refuse to acknowledge the difference between texts of empirical verification and aesthetic and artistic and spiritual discourse.  To confuse discursive practice has led to all kinds of folly.  All language users have diverse discursive practice.  Wisdom comes knowing when and where to use a particular discursive practice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 22, 2022

Many words in art, poetry, religion, and the visionary images of cinema do not conform to the standards of empirical verification and yet we don't say that such presentations are humanly untrue.  Such words have a different truth function than the words of a scientific theorem.

Aphorism of the Day, December 21, 2022

The unbelievability of the birth of Christ is to challenge the discourse of science and empirical verification as being the only and superior truth discourse.  The discourse of wonder co-exists with empirical verification, not to deny it but to inspire beauties of the heart or inward thinking which lead to the moral beauties of love and justice and care in our practice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 20, 2022

What makes the incarnation unbelievable is actually the always already of the Sublime inhabiting human experience.  The incarnation is a signifying reminder of what has always been.

Aphorism of the Day, December 19, 2022

Incarnation and creation.  The Christian metaphor of God being completely in a baby Jesus bespeaks of God being completely with us in the Beginning.  Creation and Incarnation can be appropriated as Sameness within Diversity.  The Sameness of God happens in God omnipresence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 18, 2022

Why did the Gospel writers write the birth of Jesus as a fantasia of angels, shepherds, magi in beautiful magic realism?  It was a profound artistic way to put in story form the wonder of the birth of the Risen Christ within each soul.

Aphorism of the Day, December 17, 2022

The infancy narrative about the birth of Jesus were written as an "as if" narrative using the presentation of the an actual event to indicate the substantiality of the inward spiritual birth of Christ within the lives of the early Christ communities.

Aphorism of the Day, December 16, 2022

A main vocation in life is to know oneself as a language user among other language users and to study why one and others brings to language forms in orality, writing, and body language deeds the "language products" of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 15, 2022

Religions are essentially for community identity to give transcendental legitimacy for a community's right to exist.  Such transcendental ideology provides social cohesion and is useful in uniting against other tribes with different community identities, based on different transcendental ideology.  The modern age juxtaposes various communities with hyper awareness of the "others" presence.

Aphorism of the Day, December 14, 2022

Is it a coincidence that two men named Joseph in the Bible received dream communication from God?

Aphorism of the Day, December 13, 2022

The Bible presents dreams as a way in which God directly communicated to people.  We don't seem to give such divine authority to dreams today.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2022

As much as we enjoy the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, they also are spiritual manuals for the early churches to teach about how the Risen Christ is known to be born within each person.

Aphorism of the Day, December 12, 2022

Immanuel is a name which states the ancient creation story of humanity bearing the image of the creator.  The generalized image of the divine on creation has moments of becoming more apparent, and for the Gospels, Jesus was the most apparent case.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 11, 2022

The Magnifcat remains unfulfilled and is an eternal witness against the exploiters of the poor and vulnerable, including those who don't think they are doing it because of the blindness of the banality of their class blindness.

Aphorism of the Day, December 10, 2022

The solipsistic insight is that each person presides over one's own universe, one in which as the chimerical self participates in limited freedom in having one's existence impinged upon by the contextual linguistic structures where one has been thrown.  Such individual universe ceases to exist at one's death for those who had heretofore had lifely access to.  As to continuity in other manifestations of that unique universe in the deathly future, one cannot pretend to have much specific knowledge.  Personal apocalypse is one's own death which can happen anytime within the probable human conditions.  One of the functional meaning of generalizing personal apocalyptic to corporate or social apocalypse would be to imagine an end to some intolerable conditions for a group of people who need the visualization of their corporately shared suffering ending in order to survive the harshness of horrendous life probabilities.

Aphorism of the Day, December 9, 2022

Without being temporally provincial, we living in the present as the latest time, know our time to be  superior to the past in terms of quantity of occasions of experiences and it is the ever contemporary task to add quality to the time of our lives.

Aphorism of the Day, December 8, 2022

Words of the Risen Christ channeled in the early churches state that John the Baptist was the greatest born of women, but least born into the kingdom of heaven was greater.  This is hyperbole-speak for contrasting spiritual and natural births.

Aphorism of the Day, December 7, 2022

Patience is related to self-control; it is having impulse control to wait for future timing of something to come, arrive, or happen regarding one's well being.

Aphorism of the Day, December 6, 2022

The irony of wanting universal regard means that the sense of one's special favor has to be transferable for everyone to know the same sense of favor.  The easy way out is to be merely ethnocentric and live as though only our group is God's favorite.

Aphorism of the Day, December 5, 2022

The realm of God in time means that the present is always the latest time and as such surpasses in occasions of time all preceding events.  The latest is the greatest as such in quantity of time and the human work is to make the latest qualitatively good time in re-contextualizing everything that went before and serving up remnants of memorial traces with new applied recipes of love and justice.

Aphorism of the Day, December 4, 2022

A prophet is one who is aloof from the banalities of evil and neglects of goodness, to rebuke and point the way to better living.  A prophets hopes to make goodness banal in the place of unrecognized bad habits.

Aphorism of the Day, December 3, 2022

Hermeneutical laziness accounts for the break down between science and religion.  Failure to appreciate that biblical writings were omni-competent literature for ancient people which included lots of utopian images, wish fulfillment texts, and heroic final intervention stories.  After science became our predominant way of living with probabilities based upon empirical verification, such dominance became the preferred truth criteria.  So, religionists responded by starting to act as though all ancient texts recounted events which could have been empirically verified.  We've been caught in a war between aesthetic truth/story/mythic truth and scientific truth.  We can be both aesthetes and scientists.

 Aphorism of the Day, December 2, 2002

Much of biblical writing could be characterized as "wish fulfillment."  For example the Lord God intervening to care for the poor and the downcast in physical ways, and the utopian visions of how life might be better.  It is humanly true to want to know more ideal conditions; the issue of faith is how to implement in incremental ways toward the ideal conditions.

Aphorism of the Day, December 1, 2022

Freud referred to religion as the wish fulfillment and the future of illusion.  He perhaps wished to cordon off science from religion as having a different kind of superior truth value, even though it is undeniable that people live by such "illusions" as love, justice, and world peace.  These things have no complete empirically verifiable content, but apparently people know when they partake of experiences such things as love, justice, and peace.  Future illusions of love, justice, and peace continue to have functional truth relevance.