Comments by "Jeremy Firth" (@jeremyfirth) on "Heavy Things Lightly" channel.

  1. I think Pageau was on to something in his conversation with Styxhammer666, when he said that perennialism can be a form of dilettantism because there's no initiation into a path, or no true surrender to a path. Jonathan's critique of the modern mind trying to always stand outside and above, in some non-existent "objective" worldview seems related to perennialism to me.
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  2. John, your Marlon Brando impression is on point.
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  3. I'm firmly in the "aliens = demons" camp.
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  4. 47:00 Along the lines of the thousand people who are watching and being affected as John V and Jordan P are working through their own stories: for me, I am also realizing that I was spoiled by Hollywood (and even by books) into forgetting that difficult and complex stories take a very long time to play out. Even in our culture (especially in our culture) we can see the decline and we all know that it's on a crash course for falling apart, but what I'm realizing is that the fall of Rome wasn't an event. It was a long decline, with some definite mile markers and punctuation points, but the death of something great also happens in fits and starts, in slow motion, then all of a sudden.
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  5. I've been working on an analogy to use to explain to my family and friends why I am now an Orthodox Christian after being an atheist for many years. I use humor or jokes as an example. If someone tells you a joke, and it strikes you, you will laugh. In the materialist West, an argument has broken out between two camps: those who say the story in the joke exactly happened as described with no more or less detail (those who argue for sola scriptura and the scientific reliability of the Bible) and those who claim the joke can't possibly be funny or make anyone laugh, because the story didn't actually happen. But jokes operate in a middle space, where stories are used to point at reality. It took many, many years for me to begin to see that the stories in the Bible did happen, but they are told the way they are to be memorable, and to point at patterns in reality. They are pointers in much the same way that jokes point back at paradoxes or contradictions, or they use puns and double meanings to surprise the audience. True religion operates in that same way. If you are arguing over if a text is scientifically accurate, you're completely missing the point of what is written. To take the analogy further: if someone asks you to explain why you laughed at a joke they didn't get, and you have to start taking apart the joke and explaining the different parts and explaining the backgrounds of the phrases or how a word was used as a pun, the joke loses its flavor. It's no longer funny to you nor to them. The life and surprise the joke contained has been let out of the bottle, and you can't really put it back in. That's frequently how I feel when trying to explain my religious experiences, or my religious insights.
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  6. I love the toast at the end. Thanks John and Jon!
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  7. After leaving Mormonism clear back in 2002...looking back, this is one of their most destructive doctrines. They teach that we have a transactional relationship with God. They have a scripture in their scriptures that says "There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated." Teaching transactionality with God feels utterly blasphemous to me now. This teaching destroys any understanding of God's love, or of love in our human relationships.
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  8. This setup looks so much better. You're closer to the camera, and you aren't looking down the whole time. And the focus got fixed. And I can't wait to hear the interview. Great work, FTF team!
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  9. That intro is fire
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  10. "Talking about heavy things lightly" reminds me of festina lente: "make haste slowly". The traditional symbol for that phrase is a dolphin swimming around an anchor.
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  11. 50:00 John was asking "What is the American Spirit?" I want to make an attempt to answer that, drawing from my pioneer heritage. My ancestors five and six generations ago converted to Mormonism in England. At that time, the Mormon church was encouraging new converts to come to Zion (their name for what is now "Utah") and help build Zion. It was a utopic vision to come into the desert and build a separate civilization here. They faced ridiculous odds, gave up everything, and came to the desert. They were homesick and confused, so our street system is a strict grid. We have an enormous and intricate irrigation system of reservoirs, artificial canals, and piping to bring water to the whole valley. And we have lawns, because my British ancestors missed their homeland. They missed the grass. We have fruit trees and asparagus still grows along the old irrigation ditches because it was planted there by the pioneers. They threw everything they owned in a small cart and pushed it by hand across the Great Plains and across half of the Rocky Mountains to be a part of the Zion the Mormons were trying to build here. It didn't hold. Political ambitions set in, and the railroad connecting at the Golden Spike, connecting the two coasts with this new utopia ripped the dream to shreds. It was corrupted and colonized and infused with materialism and worldliness. This decline can be traced by the architectural history of the tallest building in Utah over time. At first, the tallest building in Salt Lake Valley was the Mormon Temple. The whole grid system of roads uses the southeast corner of the temple as the center of the grid: 0, 0. It was the center of the community. The railroad was completed, and Utah wanted to join the United States. Utah got political ambitions, and they applied for statehood with a goal of becoming nationally relevant. They built a Capitol building that is a direct replica of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., and that was the tallest building in Utah. Then, the Mormons got more and more acquainted with the modern world and all its charms, and slowly turned from a peculiar religion into a mainstream church, and became a full-on bureaucracy. They built the Church Office Building, which became the tallest (and still is, by law) the tallest building in Utah. When I was a child, the Mormon Church taught adamantly that the members should avoid shopping on Sunday. Now, the Church owns the largest shopping mall in Utah, and this mall is open on Sunday. This is a microcosm of the story of America.
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  12. I love the segue: "I am talking about algorithms and how they work. And war. How war works. Total war." This is a classic John move.
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  13. I haven't watched the video, but in this spirit, it's fun that in America when we send out a birth announcement, we add all the vital stats so that our friends can add them to the spreadsheet lol. Weight. Height. Time of birth. Date of birth. I once heard someone muse that baseball is still so popular because it generates so many statistics for baseball nerds to analyze and memorize.
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  14. 14:00 quote from the "bible" (it's not in the Bible, but a lot of people think it is) of "Christicans": "God helps those who help themselves."
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  15. Come yo Sts. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church in SLC, Dr. James!
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  16. This looks like it's going to be great!
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  17. I'm writing this comment before I have listened to the episode, but the longer I'm Orthodox, the more I believe that "secular space" is a complete illusion. It's a prideful distinction.
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  18. Yeah, you can't link to outside sites in youtube comments. You can link to timestamps or to other youtube videos/channels, but that's it.
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  19. With regard to America becoming an empire: as an identity leaves its center (we still call it the "Heartland" until the "Heartland of America" became a registered trademark of Chevrolet, that is), the identity loses its essence. It gets diluted. When you leave a fruit tree unpruned for several years, it spreads out and gets much bigger, and many more leaves, but the fruit gets smaller and more bitter. It goes wild, feral. America has expanded the empire, absorbed too many cultures, and sacrificed what made her different on the altar of consumerism and apathetic agnosticism. We've lost our heart.
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  20. St. Silouan the Athonite said that man's search for truth will inevitably result in pantheism because truth is not a "what". Truth is a "Who". Namely, Jesus Christ.
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