Dr. Jordan Peterson recently appeared on a podcast with YouTuber Jonathan Pageau, where the conversation touched on Christianity and Jesus Christ. During the exchange, Peterson becomes overwhelmed with visible emotion when sharing his thoughts on Christ. Watch the clip from the podcast below.
The discussion began with the mystery of the human conscience, where Peterson said, “To some degree that conscience can be viewed as the voice of reciprocal society within and that’s a perfectly reasonable biological explanation. But..but the thing is…is the deeper you go into biology the more it shades into something that appears to be religious because you start analyzing the fundamental structure of the psyche itself and it becomes something well, it becomes something with a power with a with a.. with..with a power that transcends your ability to resist it.”
Peterson then pointed out the historical documentation of Jesus Christ, “So, okay, so you can think about Christ from a psychological perspective and the critic, the critic, my critic this particular critic that I’ve been reading, said well, that that doesn’t differentiate Christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods and of course, people have made that claim in comparative religion. Joseph Campbell did that and Jung to a lesser degree, I would say but Campbell did that. But the difference and CS Lewis pointed this out as well. The difference between those mythological gods and Christ was that there’s a there’s a representation of there’s a historical representation of his of his existence as well. Now you can debate whether or not that’s genuine. You can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there’s credible objective evidence for that, but it doesn’t matter in some sense, because this while it does, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter because there’s still a historical story. And so what you have in the figure of Christ is an actual person who actually live plus a myth. And in some sense, Christ is the union of those two things.”
Then Peterson admits he finds himself “believing” in Christ where he becomes emotional and has to pause momentarily. “The problem is, is I probably believe that, but I don’t, I don’t, I’m amazed at my own belief and I don’t understand it like because I’ve seen sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch you know, that’s the Jungian synchronicity. And I’ve seen that many times in my own life. And so in some sense, I believe it’s undeniable, you know, we have a narrative sense of the world. For me, that’s been the world of morality. That’s the world that tells us how to act. It’s real. Like we treat it like it’s real. It’s not the objective world. But the narrative and the objective world touch. And the ultimate example of that, in principle is supposed to be Christ. But I don’t know what to say. That seems to me oddly plausible. Yeah. Well, I still don’t know what to make of it is to it. Partly because it’s too terrifying. A reality to fully believe I don’t even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it.”
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