https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nHEXXCT2nys
this article that I wrote for Bishop Aaron, I basically talk about how we can notice all these patterns in stories and I do it, right? I make videos about movies and I interpret movies showing how the pattern that is in scripture is really a cosmic pattern that can be found in all stories, you know, from all time and that you can find it in movies and comic books and video games and all in popular and also in politics and in all these stories that are appearing around us and it’s good to do that, it’s good to show people that that’s it, but it can never be a substitute for participatory stories. It can never be a substitute for seeing the Christian story as your story, as you being a character in that story. So you can read Harry Potter and think that it shows us some pattern of reality, but you can’t be in a Harry Potter novel. You can’t be in Marvel Avengers, right? And so we have to be careful not to confuse that and to be able to recapture our participatory patterns rather than just, you know, the kind of outer, this kind of… Well, they give you this like little dopaminergic hit. It’s almost like taking medicine versus actually like doing physical therapy and getting right. I mean, you get like, you leave a movie, even something is obviously fake. You know you’re in there, and Jordan’s talked about this, if you know you’re in there, you know it’s fake like Harry Potter. There’s nothing about you that believes anything’s real going on, but you leave with a sense of excitement and even like, you’re like excited about the world or like overcoming something, but it’s so fleeting. Like you go home, you eat dinner or whatever, you go to bed, you wake up the next day, and it’s not like you’re thinking about how can I manifest the story of Potter today? You know, like, how can I live into the reality? It’s done, you know? Maybe you buy merch or you buy a book, and you continue that way, but it’s this little mind hit. It’s not like a participational. Yeah, and so what’s left in the participational world ends up being more political, and then people get limited by the political sphere, and there’s nothing wrong with the political sphere and political activity and being politically involved. It’s just that if you limit it to the political sphere, then there’s nothing above transcending and uniting the different factions. You know, there was a time where like a nation or a flag or whatever, right? There’s some gotta be some transcendent collection or principle, right? That has, yeah, that brings us together, and so as you, if you give up the highest point that brings us together, the logos, then you’re going to devolve to the nation, but then the nation is, it’s not going to hold. At some point, you can hold it for a little while, and you can have the Pledge of Allegiance. Like they tried that after World War II, right? The Pledge of Allegiance and God We Trust. They tried to identify the highest principle kind of with the nation, but it was just inevitable that that would also come to fall apart. Yeah, yeah, it’s a short game.