I don’t think Jordan Peterson is well understood. The problem is that he is simple in some respects, but he is essentially a highly complicated and advanced intellect, that has, so to speak, forced itself, or been forced, into highly compressed and sharp public positions: and which continually has to risk the parody and deliberate misunderstanding of the contemporary world, even if his are positions that have some support.
You cannot understand Peterson if you do not understand Jung.
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An interesting article, thanks.
Why do we even consider religion? Apart from the social constructs, it’s too simplistic for any higher discussion, it’s just a control mechanism and syrup
You misunderstand Christianity.
Please read more about it..
Hey, man, Hardliner. That is tuff-talkin’, indeed!
Well I know virtually nothing about Freud and Jung, and I’m not sure I would claim to “understand” anyone as I don’t even understand myself. But Peterson seems like a good egg, with a genuine desire to share with others insights that he feels might be helpful. Most of what I have seen and read has seemed like basic common sense to me. He is also not afraid of speaking truth to power, and being articulate and well prepared when doing so, and he’s now too big to cancel.
Seconded. Keep fighting the good fight, Dr Peterson.
They tried to cancel Jesus. Whoops!
Shame that so many now worship him as a god. Exactly what he told them not to do. He wanted them to think. To be free. He was far too optimistic.
I know that Freud was wrong.
I don’t know much about Jung.
Jesus or JBP?
The worshiping isn’t so bad: it’s the lack of thinking that is hobbling individuals and, of course, the Church. If you feel a need to worship, and can still think from time to time, Jesus isn’t such a poor choice. But, as they say, he can’t magic up and implement a solution without any effort on our part. No doubt, he could if he wanted to, but he has the wisdom not to.
That other ‘religion’, Socialism, specialises in worship and not thinking, leading to mass movements that create goals, without a plan, and often they are static goals that have great difficulty in adapting to changed circumstances, like the NHS, or the Church itself.
You are absolutely right that E-zus (there was no “J” in ancient Hebrew) never said he was Almighty God, never told his disciples to worship him, nor told them to worship the evil woman who kidnapped him as a newborn, nor to crawl on their knees before her statues, nor to pray to her nor to him, nor to slobber over her icons.
He always referred his disciples to his FATHER, and told them to pray to his FATHER.
He wanted them to REPENT THEIR SINS, as his non-identical twin brother E-an Christ the Baptist taught, and to GO AND SIN NO MORE, as E-zus taught.
E-zus said many times that without true repentance, there can be no salvation. For example, in Luke 13:3 and 13:5…
I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
I know little about Freud save that I hate his legacy of everybody and his dog being convinced to know all about other people’s hidden motive which are – by strange coincidence – always grossly enlarged caricatures of their own vices. He liked to speculate a lot about human nature, took way too much cocaine (still legal back then) and became convinced that sex is really all that matters. Many of his contemporaries thoroughly despised for him that. One sexual revolution later, he has become a universal modern idol, alongside Au-Wehwehweh’s marble dildos impersonating art.
No more Freud.
Very well put
Freud got a lot of publicity for the same reason as Darwin: they had some ideas that were simultaneously scandalous and exciting: man is just an animal and all his problems can be traced back to some oppressed sexual urges. “Whoa!”, thought the crowd. Finally we can liberate ourselves from such outdated ideas as shame and self-restraint.
The outcome is rather disappointing, however. Rather than a guilt-free era of free love and liberation, we just destroyed the family and social cohesion and developed mass murder to industrial levels.
Love and Sex are two entirely separate things.
Sex is a mere physical act designed for procreation, not recreation, and not some elevated mystical thing.
I think I’ll use this when anyone asks me what I think about Jung.
Excellent points.
Sex is a Soul Trap.
Jordan Peterson is a thoroughly decent and intelligent guy who noticed the inherent totalitarian tendencies hidden behind the woke facade. He stood up against it and became, perhaps unintentionally, a sort of prophet. I like him very much although he can be a bit long-winded.
I don’t know how Jung could be considered non-religious. Maybe he didn’t attend any church, that doesn’t matter. His book “Answer to Job” is one of the most important discussion on the subject.
As to Christianity, anything outside Christ is doomed. Finished, temporary, ephemeral, transient. Communism, capitalism, socialism, feminism, various political movements, trends, ideological fashions, wokery, they will all disappear. That’s the conclusion I have come to, but if you don’t believe it, I’m fine with that.
Peterson thinks. And he’s brave enough to be seen to be wrong, for he wishes others to think with him.
People can’t handle that. Never mind the era.
People like having rules to follow. Preferably the ones which tell them quickly and easily, YES or NO.
That’s what most people use “religion” for.
The eternal battle: those who follow rules versus those who think.
Gove doesn’t think. He’s a mild form of Taleb’s “IYI”.
It has been said that Peterson supports “redistribution of wealth towards the poor.” I’d like to ask him to elaborate on that one. Toby et al, please ask him if you get the chance.
Peterson is a Scientist, and knows what it means: a mode of enquiry. That requires thinking, and has a restlessness that others find hard to understand. The facts discovered may be useful, and even important, but, deep down, they are not as motivating.
Those that are happy to ride alongside his journey of enquiry are not so bothered by the present as by what is about to be unearthed.
Isn’t that why Jesus speaks in parables, because he wants us to think?
Jesus, yes, absolutely. See earlier comment. I believe he wanted us to think, not worship false idols.
I’m a fan of Dr Peterson and this article puts into words what I felt about the man and could not quite put into words. I’ve come full circle from a believer as a child based more on fear, than understanding, to agnostic, then atheist back to agnostic and now my latest incarnation as a believer.
Thanks for the article, I think it confirms what I was already feeling deep down, that is that it’s all built into our psyche, just as some instincts are.
It’s not possible to just take the best bits out of Christianity and then merrily go your way. That is because people are irredeemably religious by nature. They simply tack Christian bits into their own religion. The religious instinct has its own characteristics such as zeal for a cause, blasphemy rules, shibboleths, denunciations, “us and them” mentality, and much more. Transg*ism is like a religion, environmentalism is, politics gets like that. I even think someone like Richard Dawkins treats evolution like a religion.
The West has prospered because it accepted Christianity and didn’t try and replace it with “better” secular religions even though they may have believed half-heartedly. The religious instinct is hardwired into humans; a society prospers by choosing the correct one. To plagiarise a quote:
’You can take secular Joe out of religion, but you can’t take religion out of Joe!’
Taking the best bits out of Christianity will leave you with the equivalent of Meat Pie and Custard, something that has happened by accident, at a school lunchtime.
Jung and Freud have not been included in my intellectual development or how I learned to think.
I have no difficulty understanding Jordan Peterson.
I agree with your first sentence. I can’t say I understand all he says but am predisposed to agree with him in principle. He has had so much adversity to deal with in the past few years and I admire him for never giving up. Time for me to buy the book and wrestle a bit more with Jordan Peterson.
Well, after reading this article, I am none the wiser about Dr. Peterson’s actual beliefs about Christianity. So I looked up a bit about him on the internet, suspecting that he was a closet Catholic or about to convert to one, and lo & behold, found this:
“But I think Catholicism–that’s as sane as people can get.”
And this:
Jordan Peterson discusses wife’s ‘miraculous’ recovery from cancer and her embrace of Catholicism – EWTN Global Catholic Television Network
He also spent 3 weeks in a Catholic Austrian monastery, writing one of his books.
So I expect we shall soon be hearing that he has converted to Maryolatry, and will be crawling on his knees before statues of the Impostor “Goddess”, who provided Christians with the ONLY EVIDENCE FOR THE FAKE VIRGIN BIRTH.
The only evidence came from the Impostor Baby Thief herself, telling her tales to the Gospel writers long after E-zus was gone and all possible witnesses were dead.
You have to look at the spirit in which it is adopted and I mean adopted with complete sincerity. I remember the British politician Tony Benn, an ardent Christian who said that that Blair and Dubbya were enough to put people off Christianity forever. The pop musician Nick Cave remarked that he couldn’t really be a Christian after the second Iraq invasion. A Jungian should take a great deal of interest in shadow work. Peterson often proclaims the masculine virtues like toughness, resilience, stoicism, which is a great thing and sorely needed and yet does so in a state of complete brittleness. Comes across as on the verge of a nervous brerakdown. Which would be fine if his spiel was a form of self-criticism but it certainly isn’t that.
One sad fact about Prof. Peterson’s family is that his daughter born in Boston, 1992, suddenly began suffering from health problems at age 2, in 1994. She was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at age seven, and suffered many health problems as she was growing up. In 1992-93, the US government launched a new vaccine initiative:
“Vaccination Coverage of 2-Year-Old Children — United States, 1992- 1993
“The principal goal of the Childhood Immunization Initiative (CII) is to increase, by 1996, vaccination levels for 2-year-old children to at least 90% for the most critical doses in the vaccination series (i.e., one dose of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine {MMR} and at least three doses each of diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and pertussis vaccine {DTP}, oral poliovirus vaccine {OPV}, and Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccine {Hib}) and to at least 70% for at least three doses of hepatitis B vaccine (Hep B) (1).”
The great news is that she apparently found health and healing by switching to a Carnivore Diet, in total defiance of the Globalist Agenda to force us all to be Vegans.
Well done to her!
Mikhaila Peterson’s Carnivore Diet and Her Journey to Healing and Health
It is sad to see the decline of a gifted man. People like him there is nothing you can do to hinder their path towards destruction except surround them with a positive spirit.
Does James … (By now, we must, surely, be on ‘first-name terms’ with him–I mean on old-fashioned Christian-name terms, which, in days gone by, people weren’t on, until they had developed a certain familiarity with one another) … mean us not to notice that he is himself implicated in his topic of the day? He can’t ask us whether it is for its own sake or its usefulness that Jordan Peterson values Christianity, without prompting us to ask him the same question. Can he? Does he, or doesn’t he, “accept its truth”?
Peterson wants to use the language of Christianity (though without — or without unambiguously — being a Christian), and perhaps this has something to do with James calling him a prophet. There is a very interesting book, by Ian Robinson (someone hardly anyone has ever heard of), called The English Prophets. I don’t know whether Robinson would have included Peterson in his list (it includes Carlyle, Coleridge, Newman, Dickens, Lawrence) but there is one place in the book where Robinson takes up just this very question of using the language without the belief and practice. And what he says, of Carlyle, makes perfect sense, that he: “doesn’t sufficiently recognize the dependence of his own religious experience on the continued vitality of the Christian tradition … could not see that for his own kind of faith to be possible, there has to be generally available a more explicit, if humdrum, variety.” James, I recommend the book to you.
Incidentally, is it possible that it is the dwindling influence of Christianity and the transformation of Christian-names into first-names that explains why perfect strangers, people I have never seen before and never will again, want to call me ‘Arry?
Cultures throughout human history have always had a religion of some type.
There seems to be a need and yearning for it.
Today people have a void in their life without religion.
They need a meaning in life, a purpose to life and they’re not finding it in material things or in the secular religion.
They are turning towards religion.
Will they choose Christianity or something else like Islam?