Comments by "Jeremy Firth" (@jeremyfirth) on "Paul Kingsnorth - Entering Into Orthodoxy" video.

  1. 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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