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Post by cjm on Dec 29, 2019 18:16:16 GMT
The Roots of Religion: Genevieve Von Petzinger at TEDxVictoria
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Post by Trog on Jan 2, 2020 8:27:56 GMT
I've been reading Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life", and I have been finding it surprisingly heavy-going.
I've come to associate Peterson with the ability to make some heavy ideas accessible to lay-people, and I expected of the book to continue in the same trend - especially since I thought it was being pushed as belonging to that genre of self-help, self-improvement books targeting the general public.
I do not experience it as such. Much of it is rather densely written, and at other times I feel it's belaboring the point to the extent where I find myself thinking: "Okay, I get it. Can we move on, now?"
It certainly does not have the lucid, concise quality I find with his lectures and interviews.
Anyway, in the book I imagine him almost developing "A Genealogy of Western Religion", akin to what Nietzsche did with "A Genealogy of Morals". Almost as if he is saying: Even assuming that there is not a (Abrahamic) God and a subsequent Christ, this is pretty much the story we would have developed about them anyway, because we HAD to - because our Western Civilization is intimately interwoven with and dependent on this story.
Another thing I find a bit bothersome, with the book and with Peterson more generally, is that I'm pretty sure that he is pretty close to being an atheist himself. I've certainly never come across him explicitly declaring his belief anywhere, and I guess that his position is very much like my own: That irrespective of the truth or not of these thing, for a society to function effectively, and to ultimately survive, it is vitally important for it to have some coherent system of religious underpinnings. It's just that I find it faintly irritating that he does not come right out and say so, and rather seem to suggest that he adheres to some form of Judeo-Christian worship.
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Post by cjm on Jan 3, 2020 7:17:37 GMT
I've been reading Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life", and I have been finding it surprisingly heavy-going. I've come to associate Peterson with the ability to make some heavy ideas accessible to lay-people, and I expected of the book to continue in the same trend - especially since I thought it was being pushed as belonging to that genre of self-help, self-improvement books targeting the general public. I do not experience it as such. Much of it is rather densely written, and at other times I feel it's belaboring the point to the extent where I find myself thinking: "Okay, I get it. Can we move on, now?" It certainly does not have the lucid, concise quality I find with his lectures and interviews. Anyway, in the book I imagine him almost developing "A Genealogy of Western Religion", akin to what Nietzsche did with "A Genealogy of Morals". Almost as if he is saying: Even assuming that there is not a (Abrahamic) God and a subsequent Christ, this is pretty much the story we would have developed about them anyway, because we HAD to - because our Western Civilization is intimately interwoven with and dependent on this story. Another thing I find a bit bothersome, with the book and with Peterson more generally, is that I'm pretty sure that he is pretty close to being an atheist himself. I've certainly never come across him explicitly declaring his belief anywhere, and I guess that his position is very much like my own: That irrespective of the truth or not of these thing, for a society to function effectively, and to ultimately survive, it is vitally important for it to have some coherent system of religious underpinnings. It's just that I find it faintly irritating that he does not come right out and say so, and rather seem to suggest that he adheres to some form of Judeo-Christian worship. No doubt there are aspects of Christianity (and Jewism) which can be found in pagan religions/morality (eg the Greek) as well. In that sense many of the Christian beliefs might have found their way into mainstream society whether as religion or "morality". However, particularly thanks to the Roman Empire and Constantine in the 4 th Century when Christianity was absorbed into the Empire, it received an international boost which no other religion ever had. I would question whether Christian beliefs would have received the predominance it had without that historical "fluke". An atheist "religion" might well have looked much different.
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