Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Paul Vanderklay on Peterson, Vervaeke, and why Sam Harris is wrong

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

Paul Vanderklay is a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of North America. In this conversation we talk about Jordan Peterson's / John Vervaeke's / Jonathan Pageau's and Sam Harris' influence on "new Christianity."This wasn't going to be releaseed because Paul Vanderklay and I had our schedule's jumbled; meaning, I had simultaneous people vying for my attention due to double-booking meetings and as a result, am not as present as I would have liked to be. However, due to a few requests I'm releasing and hopefully you enjoy, since Peter does a superlative job in my absence (despite the issues with the sound quality). If you'd like Part 2 with Paul Vanderklay, let me know and leave your questions for him below. - Curt Jaimungal PAUL VANDERKLAY YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGsDIP_K6J6VSTqlq-9IPlg Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulVanderKlayJOHN VERVAEKE YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/johnvervaekeJONATHAN PAGEAU YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtCTSf3UwRU14nYWr_xm-dQ Twitter: https://twitter.com/PageauJonathanINFO FOR CURT JAIMUNGAL Patreon *NEW*: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/bluthefilm * * *0:00:00 Introduction to Paul Vanderklay 0:02:55 What are the pros and cons of Jordan Peterson's, John Vervaeke's, and Jonathan Pageau's approaches? 0:08:10 How Christian is this "new Christianity" put forward by people like Peterson, and Jung? 0:10:04 Is this the same old debate that Dostoevsky / Nietzsche referred to before the 1900's? 0:13:15 On Solzhenitsyn and the new definition of "religion" 0:16:32 What makes someone a Christian? 0:20:42 What is God? (thoughts on the Sam Harris / Peterson debate) 0:24:24 Deriding God by analogizing him to "Zeus" is incorrect 0:27:30 What's the relationship between Christianity, Secularism, and the State 0:34:16 Can you rationally prove God's existence? 0:44:40 Is Sam Harris a Christian? 0:47:47 How does "religion without religion" make sense? 0:53:19 Does freedom just mean "more choice"?

What do you got there? After I made my first video, someone comes into my church that next Sunday, says to me, I've never been to church before in my life, and gives me that poster. Dr. Peterson, sort yourself out, sir. A reliable remedy for ontological crisis, existential dread, bloody post-modernism, cultural Marxism, identity politics, and moral relativism. Why don't you tell the audience who you are, a little bit about yourself, as well as what your YouTube channel is about.

I am a minister in the Christian Reformed Church of North America, which is a Dutch Reformed denomination. I pastor a church in Sacramento, California. About two and a half years ago, I was quite fascinated with the work of Dr. Jordan Peterson, and I noticed he was doing a biblical series. There are a lot of aspects of his work that really fascinated me. And I was also thinking about communication and the medium of YouTube. And so I decided to make a couple videos about him. And people started watching my videos, which surprised me. So a couple of different things happened. One was I kept making videos where I would basically think out loud about Jordan Peterson's work and then John Vervaeke's work and Jonathan Peugeot's work and the work of the IDW and other people online, and especially how it intersects with Christianity.

And people kept watching those videos and wanting conversations. And people kept watching those videos and wanting conversations. And so I started having conversations with people online, and those conversations would get repetitive. So I started asking people if I could record them and post them, and I did. So that led to a local meetup of people interested in Jordan Peterson. of people interested in Jordan Peterson. And that led to creation of other meetups in California and around the United States, and hopefully Canada. And that led to the creation of a Discord server as an expression of those meetups, which is now called the Bridges of Meaning Discord server. And I just announced an online aspect of my church, and I'm starting something called Estuary, which is a way to facilitate these ongoing meaning-making conversations among people not specifically of

Christian belief. So all of that has been rolling out in the last two and a half years of my life. I'm curious, you mentioned Verveke. Did you get a chance to follow through on his meeting crisis lectures all the way to the end? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went all through them. John and I've had a number of conversations. Okay. So there's Peugeot, there's Peterson, there's Verveke. And they have different approaches. I'm curious, what do you see as the pros and cons of each? So Peugeot, I'm curious, what do you see as the pros and cons of each? So Peugeot, Verveke, Peterson. Peterson in many ways was the tip of the spear.

And he, I also sometimes liken him to John the Baptist. We're not sure who Jesus is in this illustration, but Peterson came on and sort of broke things open and demonstrated that YouTube was a platform that could be used for important conversations and connections in ways that aren't warped like a lot of other social media platforms. And so in many ways, Peterson was the forerunner and he broke it open. Jonathan Pajot is obviously a deeply Christian voice and also a sort of like a modern day church father who is bringing onto the internet a ton of ancient wisdom and understanding and a whole new language that has been deeply embedded within our world, within our culture, in terms of our movies. And Jonathan's been able to sort of explain that. Peterson did that too. Peterson, in some ways,

again, Peterson was the tip of the spear. Some of what Jonathan Pajot has done, Peterson had included. And Peterson and Jonathan had begun a friendship before Jordan Peterson's meteoric rise. John Vervaeke, of course, was also a colleague of Peterson. And there were two substantive conversations that they had had, public conversations, prior to Peterson's rise to fame, only one of which was recorded and is available

on YouTube. But that conversation is well worth watching. I've watched it a number of times because it nicely shows some of the differences between them. Also, Peterson's much more playful there than he is in modern times. He's been attacked so severely by the journalists that he seems to have developed an angst and an anger as well or no absolutely I do think that what I'm trying to argue for and I think Jordan is but I'm not clear because he said about 17,000 things in his last thing I want to i want to i want to try and reply to them um um i'll spit them out you sort of um with that conversation you said there were two i've only seen one you mentioned one there's only one that was recorded john john verveke told me about the other one and

said it was a terrific conversation but it wasn't recorded okay okay. Okay. So they had sort of a debate and, and because there are significant differences in their approach. Peterson is a preacher. So he's a John the Baptist figure, but he's got some cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, symbolism. He sort of had all of those pieces, but much more in a, in a preacherly format, format. As one of his critics noted in the Toronto Star, Jordan Peterson was looking to buy an unused church in order to hold forth on weekends with his ideas before he started his biblical series and that whole rise. So Peterson is really a preacher. Peugeot is an artist, but he's also an artist teacher, and so he's teaching his craft, and he's teaching symbolism with his brother who isn't on YouTube,

but has written a very interesting book. Verweke is a, Peterson's a scientist too, and that's why Peterson sort of has all of these things together. Vervaeke is a scientist. He's much more of a careful scholar, but he's also sort of a guru type who has, he knows Christianity very well. He knows a lot of Christian theology. He doesn't necessarily know the church real well, but he knows Augustine and Neoplatonism and philosophy, but he also has his meditation in the morning, his Tai Chi. And so Vervaeke has really attracted the – Vervaeke isn't Christianity allergic, but sort of the rebel wisdom side of things, which tends to be a little Christianity allergic.

There's a little bit of post-traumatic stress within Western post-Christendom about Christianity. But Vervaeke isn't that way at all, so he's a good conversation partner. Peterson is, Peugeot is, of course, openly proselytizing in some ways, encouraging people to go to church. Peterson, not so sure about that. Vervaeke, more sure that that isn't the path to the future. So that's sort of how they all lay out. On that note, I think it's worthwhile to analyze this, let's say, resurgence or revival of Christianity

in terms of Christendom and to sort of put to the test how Christian, you know, this new Christianity is. In your opinion, you find that this resurgence, this revival, is the Christianity it's heralded out to be.

I think we are, if you listen, Sargon of Akkad recently just did a video where he's not Jordan Peterson. He doesn't have Jordan Peterson's chops in terms of the philosophy or the psychology. chops in terms of the philosophy or the psychology, but he basically laid out what a lot of people like Douglas Murray are saying, who are saying, Ross Douthat asserts that in the 20th century, this is what happened in the mid-century. After World War I, many people were like, we're done with Christianity. We're done with the church. We're going to go out there and, you know, we know evolution now. Darwin has conquered. Let's go out into the world after this. Communism was one branch. The Nazis were another branch. In the 20th century, the West looked at both those branches and said, were another branch. In the 20th century, the West looked at both those branches and said,

no. But that sort of left Christianity in the West in limbo, plus the fact that American church attendance reached its peak historically during the Cold War. And so during the Eisenhower administration, Americans were like, we're going to draft God into this struggle with the Soviet Union. But that was a highly secular thing. So I think we are going to see another revival of sorts, but it's going to be, as is always the case, a little different from previous revivals and awakenings. So two things kind of come to mind, right? Is that sort of brotherhood of scientists or the secularism that comes about after the Great War for sure.

And I think it's worth mentioning too, beyond just the Nazis and the socialists, right? Even the liberal idea that you could have a sort of brotherhood of humanity or a sort of humanism that could replace the existence of God, the rationalistic aspects that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy found as more dangerous in some ways than the socialists

or than the staunch traditionalists that they also wanted heads with. Do you think that what we're seeing now is that old debate that many of the opponents of Vervaeke, Peterson, Piazzolla, opponents of, Vervaeke, Peterson, Piazzolla, are those old scores that guys like Polstoy, Bostoevsky had to settle. I think the debate is over and the new atheists don't know it. When Sargon of Akkad comes out with a video that says, why new atheism failed? Todd comes out with a video that says, why new atheism failed. And I think the rise of the new woke religion, when after the George Floyd killing and the protests, I knew new atheism was dead. It's just dead.

protests, I knew new atheism was dead. It's just dead. New atheism's project started with Comte and his positivism. Comte did, you know, tried to erect this whole church edifice because he understood at least that human beings are religious animals and that if you don't have a religious, if you don't give people to act religiously, their religiosity will infiltrate everything else. And in many ways, the new atheists were evangelical fundamentalist atheists. But the split in the church of atheism, the split in the church of atheism, atheism plus versus kind of the classical liberal atheism, demonstrated to me, new atheism is dead. And people, and so now, John Vervaeke's A Religion That Isn't a Religion, Brett Weinstein talks to Alistair McGrath on Unbelievable. And at the end of it, Alistair McGrath, who has both a PhD in science and a PhD in theology, says to Brett Weinstein, it almost sounds like you're starting

to, you know, trying to start a new religion. The difficulty that we have is that this word religion has been tagged and defined in a certain way that isn't true and is too narrow for how actual religion functions in our lives. So we use all these substitute words for it, like spirituality or meaning, all of those things. There's a proto-presbyter for the Orthodox Church of America, a man by the name of Alexander Schmum. Sandershmann, interesting guy. He was a presbyter who would work with the Americans on Liberty Free Radio, this radio station that the Americans would broadcast into the Soviet Union. And, you know, he would teach his religious teachings.

And Solzhenitsyn would keep listening in on the other end and go, wow, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. As we know, Solzhenitsyn goes to the Gulag, comes out of the Gulag, famous after that, this denunciation of the Soviet Union. And he goes to see Alexander Shmein. And Shmein was thinking, oh, my God, Solzhenitsyn, this guy's like my hero. And when he finally meets him, Solzhenitsyn looks at him and goes, dude, you're like my greatest hero. And they're both long-awaited. It's amazing.

And anyway, in his book, For the Life of the World, he talks about how there's a sense that Christ brought men to religion it not the end of God you're not something so much as what like Greta Bostred something of that nature but but an end to religion in the sense of the divide between the sacred and the world that we live in is broken down there's no bridge building that need that needs to be had. Is that the kind of sense that you're speaking in when you say that, you know, this sort of misappropriation of the word religion? How do you think it's been characterized? I think you articulated it well.

A number of people have been making this point for a while. Rene Girard made it, someone who needs to be talked about more within this IDW context. Tom Holland, to me, even though when I interviewed Tom Holland, he knew almost nothing of Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland sort of arrived. Tom Holland, for me, is the historian of Jordan Peterson. Tom Holland sort of arrived. Tom Holland, for me, is the historian's Jordan Peterson. If you read his book Dominion, Tom Holland's story is the new atheist story. Predecessors of this are two of the most influential fiction writers of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, because they went through the meaning crisis at the beginning of the 20th century and thought a lot of this stuff

through. Tolkien quite literally in the trenches, right? Well, both of them, both of them fought. A third person to be included with them, another one of the inklings who also needs to be in this conversation, who has been in the conversation to a point with Vervaeke, but in terms of my conversations, is Owen Barfield. What you just laid out here, he basically talked about as the history of consciousness. Now, this obviously can get deep and esoteric pretty quickly with some of these elements. Just to avoid that really quickly. It's a worthwhile conversation, but just to avoid it really quickly, let's keep it biblical. You know, there's a sense that this habit of we who wrestle with angels forsaking God only to be lost and find our way to him once more, it's very reminiscent of the book of Judges, right? And in those days, there was no king in Israel, and each man did what was right in his own eyes, right?

This kind of captures the relativism of that age, and if you would have ever read it. And, well, the book of Judges, right, the great tragedy in it is because they don't have a king, people are doing what they, kind of whatever they want. And eventually, anytime there's a problem, I'm sure you're aware of this as someone in your position, but just to inform audience, or maybe people who aren't as familiar with this tradition. Every time the Israelites find themselves in sort of the throes of chaos in this lawless land,

a champion or a judge would arise and deliver, or a deliverer, who delivered the Israelites and saved them from the threat. And the biggest one being those Canaanites or Ammonites, these child-sacrificing tribesmen, right? Well, a big culmination of the book is Jephthah and Samson, these guys who Jephthah, who defeats the child-s through, and that's child sacrifice, and Samson, who destroys the Philistines by destroying himself. Right. And that's quite the theme.

Right. In this new revival that we see of Christianity, the fellows you named, are they, I think this is a paramount question, it's a biblical question, are they i think this is a paramount question it's a biblical question are they actually christian because if they're not have we made the mistake of jeff to cast out our enemies by becoming that so that's what i'm very curious about well this is where this is where tom holland's work is vitally important because if you've read tom holland's histories when he gets to Dominion, he realizes that the West is deeply Christian and in some ways amnesiac about it. And so when Sargon of Akkad makes a video, he's realizing that Sam Harris is advocating for a version of Christian morality at the same time that he's denouncing Christianity. And what this means is that the spirits that are at play moving us in the culture and moving our mouths and the ideas that

we have, these spirits in many ways have come through Christendom, from Christianity, and we don't know it. That's Tom Holland's enormous thesis. So Tom Holland had this when he, you know, he had written a book on the foundations of Islam, and his book really angered many Muslims. And so one person comes to him one day and says, you know, you're picking on our faith. Why don't you do this to your own? And he thought, well, I don't have one because he was an atheist. But he thought, well, maybe I'll do this to Christianity.

And so one of the things he also realized is that ancient people didn't think they had religion. It's sort of white people thinking they don't have culture. I mean, they're simply embedded in it, and so what Tom Holland recognizes is that you cannot understand the West apart from Christianity, and then the real question is, can you continue to maintain this moral framework, which we look at as humanism, which is in many ways Christianity like, will this actually be able to be maintained when the religious practice substratum is no longer there, which is exactly the point that Jordan Peterson had been making all along, even though Tom Holland didn't know who Jordan Peterson was. So, Paul, I'm curious to know, what do you define as God?

Well, those who watch my channel know I have this weird thing of God number one and God number two, because when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson met to debate, Sam Harris, at the end of the first Vancouver lecture, everyone is frustrated because we haven't gotten to the God stuff. And Jordan Peterson, and so, okay, Jordan, tell me what you think God is. And Jordan sits down and reads a bunch of things from his computer. And Sam Harris says, that's not God. God is someone who answers prayers and tells you not to masturbate. Well, the problem that Sam Harris has is that he doesn't know any theology, and that the definition of God, since the Enlightenment, has been slowly morphing and

changing through deism and a variety of other things. So when Sam Harris looks around at people who go to church, their God is what I call God number two. This is a transcendent God who is conscious, answers prayer. You can have a personal relationship with, intervenes in history. Jordan Peterson was reading what I call God number one, which is an imminent God whose glory is everywhere in creation, who is built into it. And it's analogous to the question, if you were to tell Frodo, go find J.R.R. Tolkien, could you find Tolkien in Middle-earth?

I don't think so, but I'm where is it tolkien and middle earth tolkien is everywhere in middle earth you can't understand middle earth without tolkien yet tolkien can't be found as such in middle earth that's god number one so there's a just kind of to your point i i this idea of i don't know about separate world creator in the sense of the world being divided between the sacred and profane is totally separate this idea of secularism uh is relatively new compared to the Christianity that came out of Judaism. But what you're saying does resonate with a fellow named St. Gregory Palamas, this fellow who

believed that there was a divine essence to things, sort of, if you would, the spirit of things. It's something almost similar to Plato's forms, but that this spirit, this essence, was manifest in multiple things. And these manifestations, these words, were expressions of this essence this sort of law if you would all entities falling down are expressions of gravity but if you ask someone

can you pick up gravity for me or the law of gravity it's a very real thing at least you can get this one else but it's it's questionable that anyone could say, yeah, hold on, I'll bring it right in, right? So there's, by that sense, yeah, this essence of essence, if you consider that to be, I think it's a fair historical ground for that. It would be like trying to find Tolkien as a character. Right. And so, well well this is actually so one of the things that i came about in my own video journey is the work of ezekiel kaufman and you can find him interpreted in christine hayes's second lecture on the old testament in a yale

course online kaufman makes the point that in the ancient world, there was an assumed impersonal metadivine realm in which there are gods and powers and all of these things. When you read the Bible, well, the sun isn't a personality like in mythologies. There's no origin story in the Bible similar to mythology. And so built into the Hebrew scriptures is this idea that God number one and God number two are together. And theologians have been making this point to debating atheists for years. Atheists will say, well, God is like Zeus. No, the framework is entirely different from the Bible and from the Greek understanding of what a God is. The other point with this is that another one of the things that I really divined from Tom Holland's work was that, in many ways, secularism is a secret second sister of the church. When the British colonized India, the Indians, those in India, they didn't know they had a religion. Well, the

British came and had, well, they had to give it a name. And so, well, you have a religion. Well, it's called Hinduism. This is the same observation that Tom Holland makes of the ancient world. If you would, the word religion is almost not in the Bible at all. And where it is in the Bible, in the book of James, is significant in terms of how the Hebrew prophets changed this understanding of what a religion is. And so what happens in modernity is that, well, now suddenly the assumption is that there's this secular, in a sense, a secular, empty, metadivine realm, which is impersonal. And so, well, what happens as colonialism conquers the world is that, well, now suddenly everybody has a religion. They might be Christian, they might be Judas, they might be Hindu, they might be Buddhist. This is a Christian conception that has entirely remade the world and nobody knows it. knows it. And what you've actually done is set up Christianity in this conception. And you've also set up the opposite of Christianity, the opposite, but you've also set up this secret sister called secularism that is sort of next to the church, but I'm not going to go to

church. I'm going to live in this secular realm. You know, read Charles Taylor. It's an entirely new thought that Christianity brought into the world. Aren't these new Christians, if you would, if you can call the old people, the new atheists, okay, well,

is this new Christianity, this revival that we were talking about earlier with Peterson, Jean-Pierre Jarreau, maybe with the exception of Jean-Pierre Jarreau on this case, and Verbeke, is this secular Christianity still, or have we broken it? And what is the Christian's relationship to secularism? In so much as there is a state, should it be a Christian state?

People get most annoyed when I make the observation that Jordan Peterson is highly postmodern, because they say, no, he's fighting against postmodernity. But they have this idea, this political idea about, you know, all of this stuff as postmodernity. But in a sense, after modernity, we all can't help be but postmodern. And this is, in a sense, the realm in which Christianity lives within the secular space. Christianity gives birth to secularism. In the experiment of the United States, we now, you have a secular, first a secular federal government, and then by the early 19th century, all the states, the states, all, many, nine of the 12, nine of the 13 colonies had had state churches before that, but you had the Quakers, and you had the Puritans, and you had the Anglicans, so, so secular, secularity begins to

dawn, but of course, this only dawns in Christendom. This is a daughter of Christendom. Now, this awakening of God number two, so Charles Colson was Richard Nixon's hatchet man. His life is falling apart. They're caught in the Watergate web. What is Charles Colson going to do? He meets an evangelical Christian, a born-again Christian. And so Charles Colson has this experience. He has a living personal relationship with Jesus Christ. He goes home to his wife and says, honey, I'm a Christian. And she says, I thought we were

Episcopalian. And so that God that Charles Colson woke up to was God number two. He has this living relationship with God number two. This is exactly the God that Sam Harris is denouncing. Now, where we're probably going is, and what Jordan Peterson essentially does is comes onto the scene and says, let me show you God number one, and everybody lights up. And suddenly, all of those people that start, Jordan Peterson took people right to the edge, didn't bring them over the edge. And there's some celebrity atheists that have noted that. Suddenly, when they go over the edge, where do they drop into? They drop into the Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church, because they need a secular realm in which not only, so if you look at Owen

Barfield, Barfield says basically a divide opened up in participation, and eventually that happened via these narrow channels of sacraments. What happens with Peterson is Peterson, in a sense, triggers all this again, and people, I want to live in a world alive with Jesus, not just as some superhero floating around like some pagan God, which is in a sense what Sam Harris is denouncing, but the God who made heaven and earth, the Tolkien of middle earth. I want to have a personal relationship with J.R.R. Tolkien if I'm Aragorn or Frodo. And that's what Peterson tripped. What's the relationship between God number one and two? Can you say that one doesn't exist without automatically denouncing the other?

No, in Christianity, they're completely, God is imminent and transcendent. God is both a person, he is the system of all systems, kind of the impersonal side. He's also the person of all persons. See, you know, when people get frustrated with Peterson, because he's not saying that whether or not he believes in God, he'll say it depends. And I need to understand what you mean. And also what I mean, because I'm not even clear on it myself. It's as if Sam Harris is disproving God number two, or at least he believes he's disproving it. And then Peterson is not saying, I agree with you, Sam, but there is also God number one. He's saying, no comment, God number one. He's not saying, I agree. He's saying, no comment. God number one

is there also. Sam's like, well, what about God number two? He's like, God number one. Oh yeah, but tell me about God number two. God number one. God number one. And whenever Peterson says, speaking as a psychologist, keeping this scientific, that's exactly what he's saying. I'm keeping it in the realm of God number one. Now, in Christian theology, I'm keeping this in the realm of general revelation. That's a theological language. But then if you push Peterson, like ask him about the resurrection, but and but then if you push peterson like ask him about the resurrection he'll say things like i don't know how far this goes and so he's open to god number two he's saying i can't really speak about that as a scientist because science doesn't actually go there because if you look at his transliminal lectures before his meteoric rise, he says it very clearly.

He says, you know, what happened with science was you took consciousness and personhood out of the equation. That's, in a sense, Woden losing one of his eyes. So now I'm only going to see the world through, if you look at Wilfred Sellers, who was a 20th century philosopher, he said, there's two modes we're dealing with. There's the manifest image and the scientific image. The scientific image works if you take consciousness and personality out of the picture. This is where Peugeot comes in, because Peugeot says says at the end of modernity, you can find this in Thomas Nagel as well, at the end of modernity, we've realized the limits of this trick. So as Peugeot says, what we are are patterns seeing patterns. And this is the frontier where Peterson brings you saying, this is what we can learn with the scientific trick of covering one eye.

Sam Harris doesn't understand what he's doing. And so the inconsistencies that he expresses in his conversation with Brett Weinstein, for example, he keeps switching eyes. He's saying everything is determinism. We're just all watching a movie. But go out there and do psychedelics and have a meaningful life. You say, well, wait a minute.

You just told me this. He's just switching eyes all the time. But there's the manifest image and the scientific image. Peterson brings you right to the edge. So that idea, you were comparing him to John the Baptist before. I can definitely see the idea of,

I come to you as a voice crying out in the wilderness, right? Yeah, okay, for sure. I don't know if he's eaten locusts and honey in the wilderness either, but if he would have lost his job, we'll see. When it comes to this idea of the resurrection, though, which is almost, in essence, an antithetical claim as far as logic is concerned, there's almost a certain sense that it's a pretty large file. To be a Christian is, if you would, at least in large part, to believe in the resurrection in some form. There's a sense that this illogical claim, this totally irrational, almost, claim, is the reason why guys like Tertullian were so adamantly against the philosophers, were so adamantly against the intellectuals, right? He says, for example,

there's a line where, we have this here for a different question, but bring it up now, where the Christian apologist Tertullian is yelling at these intellectuals in like 240, and he's saying, for those who compels, or for who compels a philosopher to offer sacrifice, or to swear, or to publicly use useless lamps, or sorry, to publicly expose useless lamps at midday, why they even attack your gods openly and blame your superstitions in their writings with your approval. Most of them bark against your princes with your support and counterness, and they are more readily rewarded with statues and salaries than sentenced to the beasts. And justly so, for they are termed philosophers, not Christians. so for they are termed philosophers not Christians this name of philosophers does not put demons to flight or demons to flight why should it when philosophers rank demons to gods so oh I can't hear there's there's this idea in

early Christianity that is to say that it's sort of an anti-intellectualist current, precisely because of the need of faith, almost irrationality or suprarationality in that system of belief. Can you ever rationally prove God's existence? If the answer is no, is what this new revival, this movement doing kind of a futile attempt at that? Even when you frame the question that way, can you rationally prove God's existence? Could Frodo rationally prove Tolkien's existence? Can you use psychology to prove the resurrection? Is that why we find the silence there? And if not, what else is needed? Well, I am not, well, so here's a fun thing about

the, here's a fun thing about the Gospels. Jesus does these crazy outsized miracles in front of his disciples. He stills the storm. He raises the dead. He heals hosts of people. You would think, see, this is this whole proof thing, because we think, well, if someone would prove God to me of the resurrection, then, and as a pastor, I say, then what? Because look at the disciples. Jesus, they lived with the guy for three years. They saw all these miracles. They saw all this stuff. And Peter just at the end says, you disciples. Jesus, they lived with the guy for three years. They saw all these miracles. They saw all this stuff. And Peter just at the end says, you know, Jesus, I'm so down with you. It doesn't matter.

I'll give my life for you. And then a bunch of temple guards show up at night in the garden. Peter pulls out a sword and cuts off an ear. And Jesus says, I'll have none of that. And heals the guy's ear. And then Peterson runs and hides in a room and sucks his thumb. Miracles or proofs don't actually move us like modern people think they should, because this is, in a sense, the fallacy of the idea that human beings are rational animals. Now, we have a capacity for rationality, but, you know, again, another big theme within Peterson was we're mysteries to ourselves. We

don't know why we're doing what we're doing. And to me, that's abundantly clear just watching human beings look at all the ways that people completely sabotage what all of us would look at as the best things in their lives and again tolkien and dostoevsky they prove that in spades just look at read tolkien's confessions it's amazing there's a sense that even with saint thomas you know with him having to touch there's a sense that even with St. Thomas, you know, with him having to touch, there's a part where Christ comes back. The disciples are like, nah, it's not you. How do we know it's you? Tom says this, like, come on. And, you know, Christ says, oh, go ahead, feel the stigmata, like the hole in my hand from when they nailed him to a cross.

Tom feels it and says, what? Oh, wow. Okay, now I believe. I remember there was an Orthodox liturgy that declared this sense of rationalist, this need for rationalist proof, that Tom, even in that instance, is sinning. That this is not the way you go about understanding Christ's resurrection,

even if he were to appear before you. You mentioned Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky would say something along the lines of, if you were to mathematically disprove God's existence, I would still be with Christ. It's interesting. It's a whole other level of thought. Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem,

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And that's human beings, right? I mean, well, people need to be told to eat right and exercise. Oh, tell them. Go ahead. And every therapist knows this. Every pastor knows this. People come to church and they think, oh, the way church works this, the pastor tells people what to do and people do it. No pastor who's paying attention

believes that because it's not how people work. This is the comedy in the story of Jonah, right? Jonah was sent to Nineveh, go convert the Ninevites. He doesn't want to. He tries to avoid it. He finally gets there. He looks at these people who he who are the enemies right he's like enemies really doesn't like him and uh he says something almost like um you know repent or the city's going to be overturned something like that and the whole it says it's it's a spoof the book of jonah is like a spoof of the prophet narrative the people believe they're like really wow okay it. Okay. It says they believe, their children believe, the cows believe, and everyone, you know, and their moms changes their course of action. And the reason why that's a spoof is

because everywhere else, it doesn't happen. So to your point, it says a lot about the human condition. But then what makes people change? Well, and your point earlier about, well, why should Jordan Peterson be making Christians? Why should Jordan Peterson probably be, in my opinion, I don't see, I especially don't see everyone in the third world, but in my opinion, Jordan Peterson was the most effective evangelist for Christianity that we've seen over the last five years. This is a guy who isn't a Christian. This is a guy who in some, you know, there's a book signing that's on video by a guy who has a podcast in Australia where this guy comes up to Peterson and says, oh, Dr. Peterson, please sign your book. Because of you, I started going to church and I've become a Christian.

And Peterson says, oh, no. I mean, that wasn't Jordan's thing. Look at Peugeot's latest video about the story we live within. Jordan's thing. Look at Peugeot's latest video about the story we live within. Jonathan Peugeot tells, you know, a story about one of his last, you know, encounters with Peterson where, you know, the line of demarcation between Jonathan Peugeot and Jordan Peterson is Peterson's skeptical about the Christian church. Peugeot isn't. Okay, hold up here, because if the Christianity that he's converting them to is, in your own words, postmodern,

then is he really converting people? And if he's not, is this success short-lived? Are we, have we found Jephthah? Have we found Samuel, right? Are the Philistines still amongst us? And that question, you know is is really the crux of the issue if the answer is you know yes that he's that

these this flock of but say Petersonians are still as postmodern as ever how many people did he convert and there's also a sense, it's like what St. Ignatius writes, I believe in his letters of Magnesians, about how God works. He talks about the silence of God, that God, you know, there's a sort of silent trumpet that happens, these large, great historical movements happening in the corner of the earth and some stable in Bethlehem. Like it's not, it's never a giant parade if you would down the street and there's a very,

it's very victorious like an emperor, you know, he comes in riding on a donkey not on the war horse and that you know if that's the case is the real conversion happening most of it is it happening at places like your church one of the most common questions I get is what's a real Christian and I my definition is someone who trusts Jesus more than they trust themselves okay would Sam Harris then be a real Christian Peterson would say he's a real Christian but Sam Harris then be a real Christian? Peterson would say he's a real Christian, but Sam Harris is like, I don't even think Jesus lived or perhaps he's just a dude. Sam Harris doesn't trust Jesus more than he trusts himself. Sam Harris trusts himself.

Jordan Peterson is a little wobbly on, should I identify as a Christian? I don't know. If you go to the Orthodox church, in a sense, the Orthodox Church defines who's a Christian. So part of what we're dealing with are all the issues built into the Protestant Reformation. We shouldn't, we're very short-lived creatures, and we think things change fast, but they don't change anywhere near as fast as we assume they do. fast, but they don't change anywhere near as fast as we assume they do. If I may speak just very quickly on the defense of the Orthodox on that, or not even the offense, just to poke fun. There's an old joke where there's a Protestant meets an Orthodox, and the Orthodox, they start talking about God and, you know, the Orthodox says, hey, why don't you stop by the church? And the Protestant says, oh, no, thank you.

I don't like organized religion. And the Orthodox says, perfect, you'll fit right in. Because they're super disorganized. It's not like a Catholic church, right, where they have all these orders, you know, they've got a crap, uh-oh, there's a problem with you know, we need people to translate things. You've got a whole crap team of Dominicans, and that's what they do, where like there's this bureaucracy

No, it's anarchy in a lot of ways. I think most recently the Russian Orthodox Church huge, and the Greek Orthodox Church, these are and the Greek Orthodox Church, these are the two largest churches in Orthodoxy, are no longer in communion over the Ukraine.

There was an issue in Ukraine. That's right. Great schism around, too. But here's the thing. The Greek Orthodox, for example, are in communion with the Antiochians, and the Antiochians are in communion with the Russians, so they're still kind of like it's anarchy. All right. I don't, I don't know who determines who is,

or isn't a Christian in that religion. It's. Good point. Good point. But in terms of self-identification, there's no question that Jordan Peterson... So what I think is going to happen is that a lot of people who consider themselves atheists are going to continue to have another existential crisis. Because like Sargon of Akkad, and I think Vervakia is in many ways at the forefront of this, because Vervakia is consciously seeking a religion that isn't a religion. He understands that there needs to be something that functions like this, because without this, life cannot be stable or meaningful,

and a meaning crisis ensues, and we suffer from reciprocal narrowing. Okay, and he says religion, but without a religion. The without a religion part is in reference to what? Well, he's talking about the two, in a sense, there's religion one and religion two. Because when you ask Sam Harris what's religion, he'll say praying, going to church, that these practices somehow connect up with this God being that's within the system and affects changes positively in a certain way. That's how many atheists understand religion. It's amazing to me how new atheists avoid one of the most salient definitions of religion, which was Durkheim, which Jonathan Haidt has basically continued to work off of, that says religion is

the thing through which people organize themselves. That's a much smarter definition of religion. And so in some senses, Vervaeke's taking the, we need a religion in the Durkheimian sense that is a religion in the Sam Harris sense. You know, there's this beautiful scholar, he's still very active now in Russia, his name is, oops, his name, oh, anyway, sorry. So there's this beautiful scholar in Russia, beautiful scholar in Russia. His name is Sivinkotkin. And he wrote a book analyzing Stalinism.

It's called Magnetic Mountain Stalinism as a Civilization. Great book. And he analyzes it through a postmodern lens. In the beginning, he's talking about Foucault and he's thanking Foucault for this lens of analysis. And what's his magnum opus?

He says, yeah, the best way to understand Stalinism is as like a theocracy. You know, the historians before, like Robert Conquest, they would see Stalin as like the evil dictator mastermind who writes his list, he sends it out. He's just got like crazy superpower like will the grand architect cockens like no do you want to find out who gets purged and who's calling in the purges like oh hey i noticed that my neighbor you know i'm not calling but it's like hey i noticed that

my neighbor is you know uh normally only eating this many uh, but now he's bringing in twice that amount. Kulak, we've got to get that guy. It's the neighbors. It's not Stalin in his orb. The people are active participants. And so that idea of how does society organize as a religion? Yeah, the citizenry have beliefs beliefs and there's a sense that people get the governments they deserve kind of aristotle's meaning right so sorry go ahead go ahead please no peterson has this great as this great section in in one of his maps of meaning courses where

he says you know people imagine that hitler Hitler or Stalin take over and that that's how they run the country. He says it's completely untrue. People self-tyrannize them, people self-tyrannize all the way down to the bottom. That's the only way those systems work. And when Peter said that, I completely understood because I'm part of, you know, Dutch Calvinism is part of this larger Calvinist tradition and Calvinists know self-tyranny. We do it all the time. But that's actually the substance through which a society can cohere. So for example, in about 2012, 2013, I began seeing, you know, what today we would call woke religion. I began seeing this seep in. And so I began studying this a little bit. And so I found this website, Everyday Feminism, and I thought, I'll read them every

day and I'll find out what feminism is. And I began to discover it is in fact an entire religion with self-tyrannization. And I looked at Christian law and moral expectations compared to their new system. And I thought, wow, you really have to be committed if you're actually going to fulfill the law of everyday feminism. Because it's all these little mind traps. And no, that tyranny goes all the way down. But that is normal for human beings. And when we use this word socialization, that's what we're doing with our children. No, you can't steal the toy and smack the other two-year-old with it.

No, I'll hit you. You know, and so that's what a conscience is. You're saying that socialization is self-tyranny? Yeah, because you are, you know, when you walk into a room, That's what a conscience is. You're saying that socialization is self-tyranny? Yeah. Because you are, you know, when you walk into a room, what do you want to do? Well, eat everything, screw everything, take everything. That's normal for a human being. Why don't you do it?

You've been socialized. There's a difference between tyranny to yourself and then tyranny to others in the sense of the Stalin regime, with people commenting on their neighbors. So you're using self-tyranny in two different ways, one to apply to oneself and then one to apply to those on the same level within a hierarchy snitching on others? That's regular tyranny. Self-tyranny is, and again, Solzhenitsyn wrote about this too, because, you know, who are the worst people in the gulags? They were the true believers. And surely, surely the state knew what it was doing when it sent me here, because I've not been faithful to the people's cause.

you know though in christianity it's especially in monasticism this is a very prevalent theme the understanding freedom that we have now as one laden with choice this is not it's not as much of an issue in the ancient world right like the idea of freedom was more of a fulfillment of one's nature. And so when you look at something like St. John the Baptist, saying the ladder of divine ascent, right? He writes on, he writes on, you know, this idea that the Christian is almost a slave to God, right? Like the, it's not that you don't have a master. It's that you liberate yourself because your master is higher than any earthly master you could imagine. Not that you do whatever you want to do, right?

It's that you still answer the question. So there's this huge self-tyrannizing and discipline in terms of your body, right? And that's the idea of asceticism. You practice ritual fasting, in terms of your body, right? And like in what you, and that's the idea of asceticism. You practice ritual fasting, not so that you can just splurge because you lost the calories. It's you practice ritual fasting

so that when the hardship comes, man, you're ready for it, right? You're, this is nothing to you. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's exactly right. And the question is also, who is your master? I mean, Bob Dylan, you got to serve somebody. Well, in Christianity, your master lays down his life for you, or your master gives his son as an offering for you. What better master could you find that as opposed to Stalin who is happy to have

all of the people lay down their lives for him there's a on that subject of freedom there is a fellow who is in the he's in Russia he's a guy by the name of Alexander Dugin

have you ever heard of this man? he's a bit of an oddball but he's taking that ancient understanding of freedom freedom is something that's the fulfillment of nature and not so much the ability to choose and he's using

that to sort of justify the authoritarianism we find in putin you know oh like it's an interesting claim he's saying hey you know look at the look at truck you voted uh what is approval rating oh it sucks interesting but you have all this choice all this choice america isn't that great well meanwhile we know put's Russia, they don't really have a choice. Not really. But look how much the people love him. Even Putin's opponents, by the way,

lament about how much the people love him and how high he does in these third-party polls. So, you know, it's... Anyway, so he uses it as almost like an assault to Western liberty. I know Protestantism, in part, especially Calvinism, comes out of this debate of freedom as choice right you know uh who chose that you be the elect or the damned do you i don't mean to get this into like the free will debate but how does calvinism because

what a quack quack but um, and almost how does Calvinism... I definitely want to get into the free will debate. How does Calvinism reconcile that older understanding of freedom with this new understanding of freedom as choice? If you read what Calvin

wrote, in many ways, he echoes at least, there is a, I've had a couple of conversations with a scholar out of Regina, Saskatchewan, Brett Sockold. wonderful book where he basically is reading Luther and Calvin and Aquinas and saying, you know, Calvin and Luther, and especially Calvin, who's really trying to capture Aquinas. Calvin is not anywhere near as far from Roman Catholic belief with respect to free will, as people would imagine. What happens, however, so Calvin's in the 16th century. What happens in the 17th century, however, now with all of this philosophical change is that you have this new struggle in Calvinism. And I think this is because deism and the Enlightenment fundamentally changed the imaginary in which we imagine things like will. And part of what, if you listen to Sockold and someone like Bishop Barron, they'll talk about primary and secondary agency. And this again is the question, when Frodo is struggling up Mount Doom,

is Tolkien pushing Frodo up Mount Doom, or is Frodo going up of his own volition? And so these questions of agency in deism, because again, understand what deism says. In a sense, deism says the actions of God are systematized and in a sense separated from him. This is where you get into Barfieldian separation. And so it's these questions that lead to the 17th, 18th, and 19th century Calvinisms where agency is so completely divorced. But you don't find that in older systems. There's so much evidence, too, for this dualism that you're describing, right? Of which I think dualism has won over the free world debate, personally, which is why I don't think it bears any fruit anymore, to be honest.

Or at least as much fruit as it could have, right? This idea that there's this separate, otherworldly... It's even why I get slightly more uncomfortable when you're talking about Tolkien versus Lord of the Rings. It would be like Tolkien versus Lord of the Rings if Tolkien was so integrally in Lord of the Rings that he wasn't even in a separate reality. It's like, that is how integral of a connection, that's how intimate of a connection right god

would have with creation uh and so like when you look at like early christians they're not debating about the natural and the supernatural something that immediately bides into this dualism they are trying to answer the question of when does god cease to be creation when does creation cease to be god it's very but in within the realm of creation is angels, demons, your grandma, like everyone, right? All these sort of forces of the world. Do you think that we're going to keep veering away from that? Or do you think we're going to eventually reconcile and return back to this

monism? Well, this is in many ways the conversation we're having. Because, so, if the challenge to a, let's say, a biblical, the challenge is, okay, how can a good God yield a world in which there's so much suffering? All right. That question haunts people all over the place. And, and in many ways, religions are the schema by which people try to answer that question or, or the question is, well, that's a, you know, it's a Manichean or it's a, it's a you know it's a manichaean or it's a it's a it was a substandard god that produced the world okay so i don't know maybe i'm getting maybe i'm not no no no right you're right like the martianites like even early christianity

you find this as an answer there's old testament god the demoer who creates uh who is a kind of indifferent almost cool and then we have he has a kid he lightens up i'm just kidding but uh he has a kid right and we have christ and you know that's the good god of true lasting creation but there's there's this irreconcilable dualism there i i think it's it's far more fruitful to see creation on the spectrum, right? There's a sense that, and it almost explains the cruelty, right? Kind of what Shakespeare says in Romeo and Juliet, this has much to do with hate, but more with love. If you were to ask, I don't know, an ancient Jew, why are we putting the left? Why are we, why are we isolating the lepers? Very, very good question. During a quarantine era, why are we isolating the sick? Right.

And the Jewish guy would say, it's not because we hate that. It has to do with love. We're trying to save the body right here. That's, that's a huge theme. You know, or if you look at like the story of Noah with this idea of well why didn't everyone get loaded onto the yard we can't we can't save them and we don't just mean from the flood we mean like it's human beings we can't can't say this well they're not they might not even be human beings that's what we I mean because that's I you look at almost, an anthropologist will tell you almost any isolated people group call themselves the people and call everybody else, not the people. And as to do with a whole bunch of things, but you know,

you, I don't know if you've ever read any Owen Barfield, but you should really take a look at him because it's all these issues that he works with because there's this separation that happens. And once you understand what Barfield is pointing at and you read the Bible again, you begin to notice things. Like in a sense, what is happening in the Mosaic law is you have this mapping of participation. And the reason that the leopards, the leopards, they're outside the camp too, hopefully. The leopards are outside the camp and the women menstruating are outside the camp is because there's a fundamental order to things

and your participation in that order depends on your cleanliness, okay? So there is, you know, people have tried all kinds of different schema to understand the mosaic purity codes. And I think in some ways, chaos and order isn't the bad mapping of some of this, that a fish that swims through the water and has scales, that's in order. Something that's climbing along the bottom of the sea. I mean, so you get this mapping of order and disorder. But then Jesus comes along and says,

which people don't pay anywhere near as sufficient attention to, says, it's not what you put into your mouth that makes you unclean. Right. There's this, and there's this sense of that. The miracle is not it's if you would, I guess this is a miracle. There's a sense that Christ isn't limited where, you know, when he sees the leper, it's not, man, we got to quarantine that guy. I don't know what to do with him. It's, it's the opposite, right?

The, if you were the hat trick in christendom is you you clean it's like it's not that you just keep the dirty away you purify you redeem you heal the leper you uh and jews would know this at the time like what that meant what that story meant whether literally or unliterally or allegorically doesn't really matter it's that truth can you can we clean the world um can we heal can we forgive right like that that i think is what we were originally talking about i think that's what makes someone more of a christian would you agree yeah well when, you know, they bring the paralytic through the roof, and Jesus says, your sins are forgiven. I mean, he's playing on that same thing. And they're, Paul, who are you to forgive sins? Well, is it easier to say his sins are forgiven or to say, get up and walk? When Jesus, you know, Jesus touches the leper. Now now again, in the Mosaic system, Jesus touching the leper would make Jesus unclean. But when Jesus touches the leper, the leper becomes clean. in English, fishermen. If the Greek, it's a little better because they are catchers of fish.

And so this is where Peugeot's work is so, so helpful for people recovering from modernity, because if you understand Peugeot, you understand, well, what is the sea? And problem is that many contemporary English translations will translate it the lake. No, contemporary English translations will translate it the lake. No, it's not a lake. It's the sea. And Jesus' fishermen go out into the world of chaos and bring back life. And there's a storm on the sea. What is that? That is chaos. And Jesus tells it to be quiet like someone tells their little dog to go to their bed. And so this story frames the entire cosmos and shows Jesus as the culmination of what was happening with Moses and only beginning. I think this sort of strays off also into something like iconography as to what it means.

And here, let us escape Christianity for a moment, and we'll put it aside. Or maybe we're not going to do that, because maybe this is a Christian story. I think it's not really up for us to determine that. But there's a Senegalese prince in or not prince there's this Senegalese guy named Tuba Mbake and this was in the time when Senegal was being colonized by the

French, the Senegalese had to determine what do we do with the colonizers and this is a question all colonized people have to ask, what do we do with these guys some were saying revolt some were saying leave and his response

the Sufi's response the Sufi Muslim was we have to launch a jihad but what made this jihad a great jihad it was the fact that it would be a non-violent jihad, it would be a spiritual jihad, was the fact that it would be a non violent jihad it would be a spiritual jihad so he

convinces the Senegalese how people buy this pitch is also a miracle we don't fight them back we resist peacefully this is pre-Gandhi it's unprecedented we just go

and of course the french got some of them down and beat them but eventually these guys roll around and they uh you know the french realized that the blood and martyr kind of comes to see the church more gets more and more popular uh to quote our good friend fratali and eventually it's too much for the french to handle it's just violence they realize that so so they bring people and say all right listen what do you want and it was like you just want better conditions like rather modest like asks compared to what it you know what the french would ask if they were in the problems And, you know, the French accept. There's a negotiation. Things end up for

the better. Well, now if you go to Senegal, if you go to the city of Cuba, you will see paintings that are almost like icons of Cuba doing two things. I love this concept.

Thing number one. I wonder if this sounds familiar. He's walking on water, making the impossible possible. Two. So that's one. Two. He's pacifying the lions. Where have we heard that one? The great idea

of pacifism. And there's a sense that if I asked one of the Senegalese, listen, did that happen? Did that happen? Is this real? They'd be like, you're damn straight, he pacified the lions.

You know? And it's real, not in the sense that it's like fundamentally, like in a fundamentalist way, it's real. I saw a lion try to attack him once sense that it's like fundamentally like in a fundamentalist way it's real i saw a lion try to attack him once and it's it's not just an allegory and it's a true allegory allegorically true but it talks to a truth that straddles the line or is the essence of both someone pacifying the lions it's more pacifying French. And that truth is true.

It's a very real theme to this cosmic story. I've got to figure that out. To me, this is the difference between a postmodernist and a Christian. That the postmodernist doesn't believe that these themes, that these truths are ultimately true. But that the Christian does. That the world has a story and there are themes in these stories that are true and themes that aren't true. That's why when someone's a heretic, they call them anathema.

Athematic. You're not part of this cosmic theme. Do you agree with this yeah i a part of the you know part of the difficulty is okay what do we mean by post-modern but secularity I think in many ways is probably the sneakiest evangelistic trick that Christianity has ever pulled. Because it affords this enormous power by covering one eye and seeing the scientific vision. I've been listening to Hardcore History. It's a podcast. been listening to Hardcore History. It's a podcast. And he's been going through, Dan Carlin has been going through the story of the Japanese supernova. You know, the Japanese, you know, like, you know, very isolated civilization. You know, Admiral Perry steams in and the Japanese are like, we are in deep trouble because we are technologically behind

everyone. And the Japanese marshal their culture and they get to work. But culturally, they're still who they were, but now they've added science. And so they're off doing science and, you know, they build an impressive fleet. And in 1905 or six, they clean the clock of the Russians and the Russian Navy, and the Europeans are sort of on notice, and they sort of tread water through World War I. But then in the 1930s, they decide they don't have enough natural resources, so they're going to eat China. Well, China is an awfully big country to eat.

It's like the eagle trying to kill and eat the lion. Well, lion's pretty big for an eagle. So China gets itself into this war. And of course, you know, eventually, because, you know, the Americans start embargoing them. So we're going to knock out the fleet in Pearl Harbor and get the Americans into war. But they're a lazy people. They won't, they won't tough it out. So we'll, we'll get our empire. But along with this come all of these Chinese atrocities or Japanese atrocities. For example, the Doolittle raid, they bombed Tokyo, does pretty much nothing, but they, they basically look at bombing the emperor's palace and they figure out that the bombers flew and ditched in China. And so the Japanese kill a quarter of a million Chinese who are in the area.

I mean, this is just an astounding atrocity. But obviously, the cultural operating system of the Japanese is not post-Christendom. They can kill a quarter of a million Chinese, and that's simply how you do things. Okay. Japan loses the war. Christianity has never colonized Japan. You can read silence and that little effort by the Jesuits and how it's crushed.

And even today, lots of Koreans go to Japan, Americans go to Japan. Japan seems resistant to Christian, the church's colonization of the culture. It doesn't happen. But can any of us imagine Japan doing what it did in World War II today? No. Why not?

Well, these values that hitched a ride with secularism have colonized Japan. They haven't really colonized China as much, but look at Christianity and the church growing in China. And so there's this version of Christianity that we call secular that has taken over the West, and in many respects, has taken over much of the world. The question is going to be, well, what happens now? Now step in with Vervakey's meaning crisis. Well, why are Western people who have plenty of food and, you know, at one of the areas of teen suicide where the numbers were the greatest was the Bay Area. These were the children of the titans of the new world killing themselves. They didn't have a reason to live. And they had, according to the map of modernity and materialism, they had everything to live for.

Well, why were they offing themselves? Why was it after Tolkien became famous, he couldn't dare walk around with a gun or a piece of rope all by himself? Secularism exposes missing segment of the human operating system. Dostoevsky pointed this out. Tolstoy pointed this out. Peterson understands it. Vervaeke understands it. And that's why he says we need a religion that isn't a religion because we need this operating system if human beings are actually to live. And that's what we're playing out.

So I'd love to chat about this further, but we've reached sort of our time mark, and it would be great to chat about this another time, but we appreciate having you on, and we definitely think that these questions and conversations are worth having. And they're coming back, the conventions. Oh are they're not going anywhere so uh thank you uh paul will hopefully talk to you again soon okay my pleasure anytime all right paul thank you so much for that sorry that i kept having to go i got double booked too much like i'm sure yourself and

in i'm at an office space, so there's in people. It's not like I can email and say, hey, come back later. They're in person. Hey, are we meeting now? Hey, are we meeting now? Yeah, if you want to do this again, let's do it again. We'll just make sure we have the time right. Right, right, right.

And also, it doesn't seem like you care too much about getting the questions sent. You're comfortable with whatever it gets thrown your way. Did you happen to have the conversation about free will? A little bit. Okay. It's a product of modernity. This is what I'm specializing in. Conversation about free will.

No problem. Just so you're aware, I have this documentary. It's called Better Left Unsaid. It's about when does the left go too far? Very Petersonian in that question, in the formulation of the question. This is not for that. This is more for the channel itself, as well as working on another documentary. There's two. There's many. I'm working on a project on Christianity with Peter Linos right here. And it is, we're not sure what it's going to look like. We're thinking either mini doc or just put out the podcast or edit it together

into a long documentary. We're in the exploratory phase for that. So it's Christianity documentary. Okay. There's that. There's another one I'm working on on theories of everything. So my background's in physics and math and there's, I'm sure you've heard of the theory of everything. Okay, there's that, but there's also consciousness, the idea of it, and then its relationship to God. Now here's where I see myself as somewhat different

than my physics colleagues, that that's anathema to them, God and consciousness, spirituality. It's not to me. So I don't mind integrating different ideas, and I don't have that bias. I might have other biases, but it's not that definitely. That's where that conversation, I think you'll love the conversation between me and Donald Hoffman. I can't wait for you to see it. Do you like Donald Hoffman? Yeah, he's very interesting. Very interesting ideas. Great, great, great. Peterson, you know, Peterson no longer

says that he's a Christian or a believer in God. He'll just put asterisks or question marks to it. But if you look at some of his, before he was a signature, before his rise to fame, he said, here's proof of God. Here's how I prove God. Like there's an actual article by Peterson, proof of the existence of God. I can send that to you. Yeah, send it to me. I'd like to see it. And before he would say that,

I think before he would identify as a Christian, if you look at his pre-2016 work in interviews, I believe there is a statement from him saying, I am a Christian, or at least I am extremely religious, he said. Yeah, he said that to Joe Rogan. He said he was religious, extremely said. Yeah. He said that to Joe Rogan. He said he was religious, extremely religious. Right. Yeah. Peterson and his identity as a Christian is a very interesting question. Okay, man. Thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.

My pleasure.