https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CyOKMi8xgq8
One other thing I want to ask here because you do a lot of work in the ancient world and you know helping people understand it and in addition we’ve outlined some of the things like seeing it as maybe Scientific or kind of putting just materialism on it and we’ve also talked about people just not really caring about it But what other mistakes maybe do you see when people try to get into the the ancient world and make sense of it that? Is maybe leading people astray as they get interested in these things Well, the biggest mistake people make is the progressive mistake it’s the mistake of believing in a kind of social progress and Believing that we’re actually smarter than the people that were back there And so you see it all the time in scholars who? who feel like they’re kind of standing above all of it all the fray and that they’re just looking back and that They’re they’re reading scripture as if they as if they’re they’ve they’ve kind of reached a point where now they can just look at it Objectively and analyze these things and that they can pass judgment on what was given to us And I think that that’s the biggest mistake the biggest mistake is really the arrogance of the modern person Who thinks that that they have a right to? To simply judge what was given to us rather And I think the right way to do it is rather to receive to receive what has been given to us to receive through the authority of scripture through the authority of of those that were behind us that were be that were before us and to to approach it with a kind of reverence and humility and Think that rather approach it in thinking that I have to learn from that and I don’t have to I Don’t have to justify it I don’t justify it in the sense that you know make excuses for it or Try to explain it to in a modern way, but rather just kind of receive it first That’s I think is the is the best approach to begin with and once you do that In the Orthodox circles we always talk about what they call the mind of the fathers, right? You need to get the mind of the fathers and I think that that’s the approach that you can come there once you Once you kind of get the mind of the fathers or you approach it then all of a sudden Things start to come together and you realize that it’s mostly about a worldview Rather than about you know this or that information which is correct and this or that law which we’re follower We do this or we don’t do that it starts with a way of seeing the world first and that’s that’s the I think That’s what I’m trying to get people to kind of capture once again Yeah, I that’s a great summary of Acquiring the mind of the fathers there and I think for a lot of people they’re gonna say you know a lot of people that At least watch my videos are gonna say yes, I want that but they might find their you know Secular materialism harder to shake than they It’s yeah, it’s kind of the water that we’re swimming in at times How is it that we begin to unravel that because I can I can picture people saying I want to think like them Yeah, but I’ve spent 20 30 40 50 60 years You know just kind of encultured into this way of thinking like how do I undo that? Yeah, well there are interesting ways that are presenting themselves to us right now I would say it’s an interesting moment because Postmodernism has actually had quite been useful I think postmodern has been useful because it’s broken down the kind of hegemony of modernistic thinking and this this silly 19th-century idea of a like a neutral universe that I talked about this neutral universe that we’re just gonna understand We’re just gonna master it and then like we’ll be done This can’t it just no one can have that position anymore And so in in cognitive science right now, there’s a whole movement which is realizing how let’s say even human perception works and John Verbeke who was a psychologist at the University of Toronto that I that I have a lot of discussions with he talks about common combinatorial explosion Which is the problem that there are too many facts out there? that in fact the world is there’s too much everything around you is Indefinite in in detail and so despite that we’re able to perceive unity Where we can see that this is like in front of me? I have a microphone in front of me I have a screen but that that one thing is made out of millions and millions of details and so the the the what even cognitive science right now is realizing that without Without meaning without patterns that you cannot perceive the world That it’s it’s actually flipping back to almost like an ancient worldview, which is that You cannot see the world without meaning so from nihilism from this weird nihilism of late modernism We reach to a point where actually meaning is inevitable Because without it you can’t even see you wouldn’t be able to walk through a room Because there’s so much information coming to you and this and you all everything you do is purpose oriented Like all the actions you pose are purpose oriented so once you kind of so once you at least get that like you understand that this this idea of Just neutral reality is not is not possible You don’t have access to it And you wouldn’t want to have access to it because you need to live your life and you need to right you need to engage the world In a way that’s meaningful or else you’re gonna die like it’s as simple as that So if so once you get that then all of a sudden then I if I you can reengage Patterns once again, you can understand for example that human interactions are always ritualized that you can’t avoid rituals and And you know that because if you try to do the opposite of what the social rituals are you would see what would happen Right if you like if you if you if you talk to the back of the head of someone or if you I don’t know you You just lie on the ground in front of the person while you’re in the conversation like there are millions of Insane things that you could do to break the ritual of human interaction But once you kind of realize that then you can see that ritual is not only it’s it’s not only Important, but it’s inevitable. We cannot engage the world without ritual If I encounter someone I have to ritualize my relationship with them So once again now once you see that then you’re like, okay Well, that’s what stories are stories are like really are like facts brought into ritual you take all these facts and you put them into a pattern and now they become meaningful and so All of a sudden now once again a church ritual doesn’t become so strange and weird anymore It’s not so arbitrary because you realize that all your interactions are ritualized that everything you do has a pattern to it And so now to stand together and to sing together Towards something which transcends us you realize that wait a minute We do that we do that all the time like if I go to a sports if I go watch a sports event I’m doing that if I you know if my family gathers together to celebrate a birthday I’m doing that and so the fact of doing that in in a church worshiping God all of a sudden Just brings it higher up on the level of what we’re doing like it It’s a higher and higher purpose like going to see a sports event. It’s fine But you’re celebrating something which is that they a little lower on the hierarchy of being Participating in the 4th of July or in a national holiday is something which is a little higher than my sports team But then that kind of moves up towards the idea of celebrating the infinite love which spawned the universe like okay That’s pretty high like I don’t know if you can get any higher than that and that will appear in the way that it does Right standing together doing things together singing together being directed in the same direction all of these things now Will not only make sense, but they’ll appear as almost like There’s no other way to do it. I think that’s the only way that you can actually do these things Yeah, so what I’m hearing you say is that ritual in many ways is how we’ve gotten our World view that we have that it should you know The way that we’re perceiving meaning is going to shape how we see the world And so ritual is also the way that we would change how we see the world that you know if We’re always participating in a certain kind of ritual in a certain way of inhabiting the world That’s gonna shape how we think and then when we’re participating And then when we’re participating in say the the ritual of the church and the life of the church It’s going to be kind of pointing our affections or our heart towards something even greater and begin to shape us by that Is that a fair characterization that exactly because all your bad habits are rituals like all of them all the things you all the bad habits you engage in are our End up being rituals and they cycle in and out and they come in and they always have the same pattern And so it’s like you have to kind of decide like how The only way to break the bad rituals is to engage in in true rituals and rituals that are higher up on the scale Of being then you know, you know, we like eating eating the second piece of cake or whatever like that It’s like oh that comes over once again and again It’s like I got my take my cigarette out and or whatever it is that little bad habits that we have are all our ritualized So once you get that it’s like, okay. Well now let’s so you can read That’s why people can understand even things that are difficult for modernists to understand you know like the idea that you go to confession and you Say you say you go to confession and the priest tells you okay Well, you need to do this say so many prayers, you know You need to do this go on a pilgrimage do these things and we think it’s arbitrary We think it’s just like compensating for your sin. It’s not just compensating for your sin it’s about engaging in a ritual that will Replace the bad one that will take up the space and will kind of reform you it’s almost like a training You’re reforming your habits reforming your mind reforming your being to be directed towards something which is other than these these Lamer these like less less worthy rituals that you engage in