The �Sermons� of Jordan Peterson

[firstfloor]

As scripture says, they will seek words that suit what they want to hear.

[KingsGambit]

This is not the biblical definition of idolatry. Nice try, sophist.

[firstfloor]

This is not the biblical definition of idolatry. Nice try, sophist.

So, you use your idol to justify your idolatry. No surprise there then.
Why do you need the obsessive repetition of the prayers and the scripture?

[KingsGambit]

So, you use your idol to justify your idolatry. No surprise there then.
Why do you need the obsessive repetition of the prayers and the scripture?

You don't even know me. What obsessive repetitions are you talking about. Provide evidence or shut up.

[Cerebrum123]

You don't even know me. What obsessive repetitions are you talking about. Provide evidence or shut up.

[Jedidiah]

You don't even know me. What obsessive repetitions are you talking about. Provide evidence or shut up.

This is firstfloor you are responding to. Don't expect reason.

[firstfloor]

You don't even know me. What obsessive repetitions are you talking about. Provide evidence or shut up.

I am not asking about your personal habits. It seems to me that it should be sufficient for anyone to read the book, make their minds up about it and move on, with or without their god. All religions have ritualistic behaviour associated with them which are cultural artefacts that have nothing to do with what a person believes about his god.

[mattbballman31]

Jordan Peterson for my sermons.

To quote Carl Van Loon in 'Limitless': "And that you would even think that, would only show me how unprepared you are to be on your own." Being a Christian means a lot more than plumbing the depths of the psychological mechanisms underpinning conscious behavior, and how the symbology and metaphor permeating the Scriptures may or may not cohere with Jung's collective unconscious, or other semiotic models Peterson would like to appeal to. There's a plausibility to it that I've read, but Peterson's approach excludes from the outset the underlying Christian-theistic metaphysic that would imbue his religio/psychological 'sermons' with a contextual-constraint that would allow what I would argue to be a much richer and deeper psychological perspective than any that would exclude it.

A good place to 'start' is by reading "Christianity and Psychoanalysis' by C.S. Lewis in his Selected Literary Essays. Then I would read The World of the Imagination, book by Eva Brann, which is a whole history of the imagination, its ability to rehabilitate language via metaphor and symbol, its ability to transmute metaphor and symbol onto the plane of mythological stories (mythopoeia) to enculturate wider societies and individual lives. Or, True Myth: C.S. Lewis and Joseph Campbell on the Veracity of Christianity by James W. Menzies. I'd also start with Poetic Diction and What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield. And then see how it plays in a Christian context with Holly Ordway's Imaginative Apologetics or Michael Ward's Planet Narnia. Then, just branch from all their appendices from there. For Psychology specifically, you can read Psychology & Christianity: Five Views, edited by Eric L. Johnson, Psychology & Christianity Integration: Seminal Works that Shaped the Movement edited by Daryl H. Stevenson, Brian E. Eck, Peter C. Hill, Integrative Approaches to Psychology and Christianity by David N. Entwistle, or Limning the Psyche: Explorations in Christian Psychology edited by Robert Campbell Roberts, Mark R. Talbot.

Church is boring because the teaching portion is mostly intellectually unsatisfying.

Depends on what Church you go to. You shouldn't expect the function of the Pastor in a Church to be like the function of a Professor in a University. The function of the Pastor is, depending on the style, 'pastoral', encouragement, drawing out applications from Scripture to everyday life, exposition of the Biblical text to draw out topical points, upbuilding, edification, etc. The Peterson-esque kind of talks serve their function in a Sunday School class, where the Church should be functioning as mini-university campuses where Christians are educated on doctrine, logic (!), philosophy, psychology, Church history, etc: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

Pastors aren't called to be original thinkers. They're called to do what I said above. And if a sermon is sloppily put together, or a pastor isn't exercising proper time management skills to craft sermons relevant to culture and Church issues, such a pastor is exposed to the rebuke of elders or other leadership to either keep him in line or find a replacement.

Well, this is a dumb comment. I know hundreds of Christian scholars personally that don't look at evolution as some kind, gooey, green, sharp-toothed monster hiding under their bed. What Christians are you reading? Are reading the equivalent of a Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Krauss, et al. for your side? Or, actual scholarship. Because if you're not reading the latter, you're in the dark.

There are no well-known intellectuals in Christianity today.

What? Like public intellectuals along the lines of a Chomsky, Pinker, Peterson, Havel, Dawkins, Eco, et al.? A lot of that has to do with the culture. Major news outlets don't give a lot of time to Christian scholarship, and Christian scholars know that the public forum for civil dialogue in today's culture isn't going to to make for a productive use of time. Dawkins tapped into such a culture and news outlets, Hollywood, YouTube channels, and Universities got the word out. It's the same with Pinker, even though he's facing a backlash right now. Chomsky got his hands in so many pies that upset the cultural applecart, and did it in a brilliant way, visiting the talk shows, going on the news outlets, taking the abuse, engaging in debates on political and cultural issues, put his finger on and critiqued many of the institutional media. And the others did what they did in similar ways in their area of impact.

During the Great Awakening many Christian churches stupidly split away from culture and tried to create their own pockets of culture (like that M. Night Shyamalan movie 'The Village') and stopped engaging in culture. So, the culture, along with the universities, the publishing companies, the entertainment industry, the news outlets, and on and on evolved accordingly. And the Christians that did stay and try and debate and engage the burgeoning secular culture were either nitwit fundamentalists or rogue scholars that made their ripple, but the secular culture was too much and the Christian culture, too many times, would say that it's, as Mama Boucher would say, "Of the devil!". Christian scholarship is still, by and large, culturally neglected, ignored, and ridiculed, but time will tell if it makes the wider cultural impact it would need to elevate a Christian scholar onto the cultural main-stage. Christian scholars need to keep doing good work, and independent bloggers, YouTube channels, podcasters, and other mediums that interface the scholarship to the listener, need to be paying attention.

The purported ones like Plantinga, Craig, Zacharias, and Moreland all have some kind of weird controversy in their pasts in which they stumbled on this issue. Heck, you even have R.C. Sproul who has affirmed his belief in young earth.

I know what Zacharias is going through right now, but what 'weird controversy' has Craig or Plantinga been through? What? That Dawkins didn't like what Craig said about Deuteronomy 20: 13-15? And isn't this subjective to a cultural perspective? I mean, Peterson has a lot of enemies that would accuse him of being embroiled in controversy. So what? All this does is poison the well with no evidence. Why did Neil deGrasse Tyson shun Sam Harris? What about Dawkins' being accused of Islamophobia? I mean, who cares? And what the heck is Moreland's controversy? Craig, Plantinga, and Moreland all don't have an issue with evolution.

[KingsGambit]

Craig, Plantinga, and Moreland all don't have an issue with evolution.

What? Moreland just co-edited a 1000+ page book critiquing theistic evolution. https://www.crossway.org/books/theistic-evolution-case/

[mattbballman31]

What? Moreland just co-edited a 1000+ page book critiquing theistic evolution. https://www.crossway.org/books/theistic-evolution-case/

Theistic evolution is different. They think that the evolutionary mechanisms (natural selection and genetic mutation) are undirected and unguided, and that we should be methodological naturalists. Francis Collins is the only one that goes back and forth on this. It's a very convoluted view, to say the least. First, they're committed to God causing the first life forms in certain ways, which doesn't go with the idea that the mechanisms aren't guided. Second, once you bring in guided mechanisms, they're no longer Darwinian mechanisms. So you can still believe in 'evolution' but deny that the mechanisms are unguided, and so you'd just be affirming non-Darwinian evolution. Third, theistic evolutionist are, by and large, deists with an adequate notion of divine action. God creates the laws of nature, and then lets them go to their thing. And you can't tell them that even if this were true, God would 'know' that the processes would lead to human life, because a lot of them are open theists.

So, that book's emphasis is on the idea that there are good reasons to think that Darwinian or neo-Darwinian mechanisms couldn't have evolved creatures like us, and that the idea of a primordial commen anscestor is probably bogus. Some critics of theistic evolution provide reasons for thinking that even humans and chimps have a common anscestor!

But none of that means that Moreland would be threatened by the 'data' of evolutionary theory, since he would provide arguments for an interpertation of that data that would need to include analyses of the mechanisms that would include 'being guided or directed'. I believe Craig and Plantinga are board with this, as well.

[KingsGambit]

Second, theistic evolutionist are, by and large, deists with an adequate notion of divine action. God creates the laws of nature, and then lets them go to their thing. And you can't tell them that even if this were true, God would 'know' that the processes would lead to human life, because a lot of them are open theists.

I don't think theistic evolution implies deism any more than Newton's laws of motion would (assuming one does not maintain that every physical movement of an object is directly guided by God). As a theistic evolutionist myself I would balk at the characterization of my view as deism (and I hardly think that a majority of us are open theists; a position I tend to think is heretical).

[mattbballman31]

I don't think theistic evolution implies deism any more than Newton's laws of motion would (assuming one does not maintain that every physical movement of an object is directly guided by God). As a theistic evolutionist myself I would balk at the characterization of my view as deism (and I hardly think that a majority of us are open theists; a position I tend to think is heretical).

I have absolutely no desire to misrepresent you. But this is the way theistic evolution is roughly defined in Moreland's edited book.

[Cerebrum123]

I have absolutely no desire to misrepresent you. But this is the way theistic evolution is roughly defined in Moreland's edited book.

It's also the same as the vast majority of TE's I've encountered throughout my life. The only ones not like that are a small handful of people here on TWeb.

[rogue06]

It's also the same as the vast majority of TE's I've encountered throughout my life. The only ones not like that are a small handful of people here on TWeb.

You move in, um, "interesting" circles.

As a TE my experiences, and the TEs that I know, are pretty much the polar opposite of yours.

[TheWall]

Look up the debate sponsored by RZIM in which He, William lane craig, and this lady I can't remember her name discuss the meaning of life.