297. Talking to Muslims About Christ ｜ Jonathan Pageau & Mohammad Hijab
Summary
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. He spent 15 years writing maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, and 12 Rules for Life, an antiidote to chaos. In 2016, before the publication of 12 Rules, Dr. Peterson s online lectures went viral, launching him into unprecedented international prominence as a public intellectual and educator. With his colleagues, he s produced two online programs to help people understand themselves better and to improve their psychological and practical functioning. He s currently working on an online university dubbed Peterson Academy. We also have with us our beloved Mohamed Hijab and Jonathan P. Peugeot, an artist and a post-modernist, who studies Christian symbolism and postmodernism. And, of course, Jonathan Pujol, who is a researcher and instructor for the organization Sapiens Institute, a research and training institute focused on the philosophy of religion. And, as always, thank you for listening to this episode of Daily Wire Plus. Please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Thank you so much for listening, and may you continue to find a way to live your best life in peace, love, and gratitude. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, Eternally grateful. -EDUCATION, EJ & EJ - Jonathan and EJ&E - EJ and Ej. (and EJ-EJ-O (Thank you, Ej-O) - Ej&O (and the rest of the staff at Dailywire Plus (Thank You for all your support and support, and all the support you've shown us with your time, love & support, support, care, and support) - Thank you for all the love and support you're showing us your support. Ej & EjEJ&O - EJ/EJE (and all the work you're giving us the chance to do so much love, support us all the way through this podcast and support us in this podcast. Thank you, and your support is so much more than we can do that we can be a little bit more than just a little more than a whisper, you can do it, you deserve it. XOXO, -EJ/ANTHORDS, EK)
Transcript
00:00:00.940
Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
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With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
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He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
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If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
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Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
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Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
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So our first special guest is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
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He is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
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From 1993 to 1998, he served as an assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard.
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He spent 15 years writing maps of meaning, the architecture of belief.
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Dr. Peterson has penned the popular global bestsellers Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life and 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos.
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In 2016, before the publication of 12 Rules, several of Dr. Peterson's online lectures, videos and interviews went viral,
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launching him into unprecedented international prominence as a public intellectual and educator.
00:01:56.600
With his colleagues, Dr. Peterson has produced two online programs to help people understand themselves better
00:02:03.400
and to improve their psychological and practical functioning.
00:02:07.220
He's currently working on an online university dubbed Peterson Academy.
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He is an artist and he studies Christian symbolism and he also studies post-modernism, right?
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So we also have with us our beloved Mohamed Hijab.
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He is an author, comparative religionist and philosopher of religion.
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He's the co-founder of our institute, Sapiens Institute, and he's a researcher and instructor for the organization.
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He has a BA in politics and a master's degree in history.
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And he also acquired a second master's degree in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental African Studies.
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And he completed a third master's degree in applied theology from the University of Oxford.
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And now he's studying his PhD on the philosophy of religion, specifically on the contingency argument for God's existence.
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In addition, Hijab has undergone formal training in Islamic studies with a focus on the Quran, prophetic traditions and legal reasoning.
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Hijab has completed Islamic seminary courses and has been given formal permission to relay Islamic knowledge on selected Islamic fields.
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Because, Mohamed Hijab is one of the very few Muslim public figures who deal comparatively with political, philosophical and theological issues such as,
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and has amassed a following with many subscribers on YouTube in English and Arabic.
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So please welcome Mohamed Hijab and, of course, Jonathan Pujol.
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So, because I'm 100% disagreeable and not polite at all, I want to just, I want to get the elephant out of the room.
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And there's been a recent video that you put up, a message to the Muslims.
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And before I say this, I do want to speak about the important topics, the theological topics and all these kind of postmodernism.
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That will come, but I just wanted to mention this first.
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Because, for me, it's just get the elephant out of the room and then we can move on.
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Sometimes it's just replaced by a slightly smaller elephant.
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Well, a smaller elephant is better than nothing.
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What I was going to say is that, you know, it didn't land well with a lot of the Muslim community.
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And I think the reason why is that it was seen as condescending, it was seen as kind of patronizing.
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What was your intention of this video, exactly?
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You know, we talked already about the idea of tolerance.
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You know, because tolerance sort of presumes that I know what I'm doing and you guys don't, but I'll put up with you anyways.
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And, see, I don't actually think I know what I'm doing exactly.
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And so, I think, well, you might have something to teach me.
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And so, it's not so much tolerance as, I would say, hopefully something approximating an expression of reasonable humility.
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Which is, well, first of all, we occupy the same space.
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And as far as I'm concerned, it would be better if we got along.
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And we've all had our own revelations, you know, personally and, let's say, socially.
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And we don't know how to integrate those revelations.
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And the message was preposterous in some sense.
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Although, not much more so than the message I made to Christians.
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And, you know, I thought it would probably ruffle some feathers.
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But I thought it might also initiate a dialogue.
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You know, I mean, certainly, there were many people who were irritated at me and thought that I was being condescending.
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Because I do have a lot of people who are paying attention to my lectures around the world on the Islamic side.
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Especially with regard to the attention that's been given to the biblical lectures.
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And I wasn't trying to either capitalize on it or interfere with it.
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I was trying to do the next stupid thing that might move things forward a bit.
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And that's actually, it's actually worked, I would say.
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And I know that's not a direct consequence of that message.
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And there have been many other Muslim groups who've reached out to me in a serious way.
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And so I think we have to understand that we're going to stumble into each other a fair bit if we actually try to talk.
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Because of all the elephants and the snakes that are lurking under the carpet.
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And I think it's a very good thing to get them out in the open.
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I wouldn't have guessed, to be honest, that you're very agreeable.
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But the reason I would say I'm prone to engage in it is because sometimes what's under the carpet needs to be revealed.
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Because it's going to cause a lot of trouble if it just sits there and brews or broods and multiplies.
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And so it is one of the advantages of disagreeable people having them around.
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Because they will haul things up for inspection that everyone else might be loath to confront.
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You know, the downside is, well, you might do that too often, you know.
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See, the other thing I've been thinking through, and you guys can tell me what you think about this,
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is it seems that in the situation we're in now, sort of globally speaking,
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that it would be useful for people of religious faith to note that there are other people of religious faith
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with whom they have much in common, one of them being religious faith,
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and that they are also confronting, as people of religious faith,
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a world that is attempting to, let's say, shake itself free of that.
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And so it isn't exactly obvious to me that it's a great time for people of religious faith
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to concentrate on their differences, given that there are perhaps more important elephants to address,
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I'm very ignorant about the Islamic tradition, and I'm trying to rectify that.
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It's very difficult to step outside your own culture and to really understand someone else's.
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And so, and I'm under no illusions, I hope, about the degree of understanding that I've managed,
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but I have tried to understand what we might share in common, and that's crucial.
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And so certainly one of the ideas that we all share in common on the religious front, let's say,
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is that there is an ultimate unity that should be placed above all else.
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And so that's part of the great monotheistic tradition.
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And I'm going to speak mostly as a psychologist rather than as, say, an advocate of the Christian tradition,
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Let me kind of push back a little bit on that point, because you're an individual like,
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obviously in your newest book, you're talking very categorically about precision.
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And I would say you're an individual that is very precise.
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You're categorized like, if I was to say anything, I would say that you're an individual that's scrupulously meticulous
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in exactitude and, I don't know, meticulousness or whatever, yeah?
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So you speak and you think about what you're going to say before you say it.
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In fact, if someone says something which is kind of off the market a little bit, you pull them up for it, right?
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You know, usually because I don't understand it then.
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Yeah, no, for example, like the Cathy Newman interview, like the assumptions and the questioning that she had when she was questioning it,
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And that's why it became so popular, the discussion was so popular.
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I say this message to the, you know, to white Canadians or something, yeah?
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And I say, look, you know, sensitively, why don't you reach out to some Russians, you know?
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Or, you know, heaven forbid, you know, reach out to black Africans or First Nation people, you know,
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whatever it may be, how do you think the community of white Canadians, let's say, for the sake of argument,
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Well, you're pretty disagreeable, so you'd probably get bit back a lot.
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I mean, I have reached out to other communities, let's say.
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I did an interview with a friend of mine who's a Native American carver who lives on the West Coast.
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And, you know, I'm not very happy with the narrative that's being promoted in Canada,
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which is that the European settlement of Canada is best viewed as genocidally colonial.
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And having said that, my friend, this carver, was in a residential school in Canada,
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and the residential schools were put forward by the government in an attempt,
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and other institutions in an attempt to separate the Indigenous children from their families
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and then socialize them rapidly according to European norms.
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And there was some positive motivation for that, and sometimes that helped and worked.
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But one of the things that did happen was that some schools were, let's say,
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invaded by people of a pronounced pedophilic and sadistic bent.
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And my friend ended up in one of those schools, and his life was so dreadful
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that you can't even hear about it without serious emotional damage.
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And so, you know, I went forward with that discussion, and it was very contentious,
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And it told a story that was true and needed to be told.
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And so, you know, you step into foreign territory at your peril, that's for sure.
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But, you know, and it was relatively difficult for me to arrange for this to be a possibility.
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And, but my thought, again, because I'm trying to look for what we have to offer each other
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rather than what divides us, I thought it was worthwhile.
00:12:49.780
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Let me push back again once again on this point.
00:14:36.840
So, for instance, I think you've become somewhat of an emblem of Western civilization, right?
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And I'll also push back on the point that this is a foreign culture, because I think that Islam,
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and you've mentioned this in the lecture as well, that Islam has now become part of, like, you know, Western culture.
00:14:52.920
Yeah, well, that's the open question, as we noted in the introductory remarks.
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We're kind of having the same discussion about Russia in some real sense, and that's really going well at the moment.
00:15:07.140
But what I would say is that, you know, if there is a bloody history of Western colonialism,
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Like, for example, look at Algeria, for instance.
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So, the issue, like, I'm giving you one example of many.
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The Spanish colonialism of Latin America, for example.
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And I'm not saying there's not things that happened only just on the Western Front.
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There are things that happened on the Muslim Front as well, of course.
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No, I'm not going to stand here and, you know, defend the Muahidun,
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who came and were very intolerant to Jews and Christians and kicked them out of their homes and so on like that,
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So, the point is, I feel like, I don't know, as a psychologist, I think my question would be to you,
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don't you think, is it of any benefit to be concessionary in this regard?
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Like, to start off a discussion by saying, like, we know that these are things that could cause resentment.
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Because, like, for example, I know a lot of Algerian people, and this is very clear in their historical memory.
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And the accusation would be that the West have colonial amnesia here.
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They don't, they are not taking into account what they've done.
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Yeah, well, they don't even know how, well, okay.
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I mean, look, here's how I would address that psychologically.
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In many of the mythological stories that I've read, there is the motif of the evil uncle.
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And so, for example, in ancient Egyptian cosmology, there were two, there were four deities, four central deities,
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although a host of associated deities, and one of them was Osiris, who was the deity of the state.
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And he had an evil brother, Seth, who was always conspiring in the background to overthrow the state
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and to establish his own rules, say, based on power.
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And the Egyptians, this is thousands of years ago, had figured out by that point,
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because their society was quite large, that there was something in the social structure itself
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that posed a threat to the structure, and that was the tendency for the structure
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and its leaders to become willfully blind and for conspiratorial powers or patterns
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that would use resentment and the desire for power to overthrow that.
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They thought of Osiris as willfully blind and Seth as an eternal danger, and that's true.
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And then, but there's another element to the evil uncle, too, which is that in some real sense,
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and it's a very difficult thing to sort through morally, all of us walk on blood-soaked ground,
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because human history is, in some regards, a nightmarish catastrophe.
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And some of that's just because life was so difficult, but it's also because people did
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in unbelievably cruel and malicious and deceptive, committed, unbelievably cruel and atrocious and
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deceptive acts. And so we're all stuck with this problem that here we are in relative peace and
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harmony so far, although we seem to be doing everything we can to try to disrupt that at the
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moment. And part of the price that's being paid for that is an endless litany of historical
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catastrophe. And then we all have to face up to, well, what does that mean for us in terms of our
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individual responsibility? And how do we construe ourselves and our society in light of that fact?
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And we could go back and forth continually about whose historical atrocities were worse.
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And that's a rough contest because, you know, the devil is definitely in the details there.
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And then it also brings up the other problem, which is, well, when the Spaniards went to Central
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America, a lot of the bloodshed they produced, or the death they produced, was actually a consequence
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of the introduction of disease, because that took out about 95% of the native population in the
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Western Hemisphere. And then the conquistadors were, well, maybe they weren't the finest representatives
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of the highest flowering of Western civilization. We don't know to what degree they were the sort
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of thugs that couldn't get along at home and went out adventuring. And even if I, say, attempted to
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take full responsibility for that, I'm not sure what it would mean, because I suspect I have a lot
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more in common with you people in the modern world than I do with Spanish conquistadors from 300 years
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ago. Now, I'm not saying I bear no responsibility for the bloodshed of the past, but I would say we all
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bear that responsibility, and that's something, I would say that's something like the conception
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of original sin. Yeah, and that's the point of difference. To be honest, I would disagree with
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that point. Like, as a Muslim, there is a verse in the Quran that says,
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that one soul should not bear the responsibility of someone else's actions.
00:19:58.820
Yeah, well, that's the other ethical complication. It's like, can you call me out
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in relationship to the atrocity of the past? Of course not.
00:20:06.920
But it's complicated, right? Because at the same time, you do say, and I don't mean you personally,
00:20:13.660
but, you know, we can say things like, well, the West is not bearing sufficient responsibility
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for its colonial past. And so at some level, that kind of devolves down to the individual.
00:20:23.980
Let me kind of rephrase it then. I think that's more of a left-wing criticism. It's like,
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you know, there's reparations and affirmative action programs. I'm not advocating any of that.
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And nor do I even believe in any of that, to be honest with you.
00:20:35.960
Yeah, so what I was putting as an alternative to that is this. There is this kind of,
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I would call this, maybe an Orientalist, a new Orientalist narrative, which states that
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Islam is incapable of X, Y, Z. Call it tolerance, call it whatever it is.
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And look at what's happened in Islamic history. You've got all of these deaths and you've got
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all of these kinds of things that are happening, comparative to what we have in the West.
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And what we're saying is that let's look at what you have in the West, because liberalism
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was an ideology that was started in the 17th century. Like, I mean, really, it was crystallized.
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You know, with John Locke and all these kind of things then. And after liberalism was established,
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in fact, the Constitution and the documents of founding fathers and stuff like that were
00:21:12.060
based on the liberal secular principles. Even after that, you had Napoleonic Wars. Even
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after that, you had colonialism continue. You had slavery continue until 1867, whatever
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it was, you know, the American Civil War ended. So what we're saying is that this picture
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of history that, you know, the West is best, basically, this idea, because our ideology can
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fix all problems. It's not reasonable when you look at the historical records. I mean,
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one scholar called Navid Sheikh actually done a piece. It's called Body Count. And he was
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counting the amount of people that died in each civilization. And he put the Western civilization
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as the highest. And because you have things like World War I and World War II, and these
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things were, World War I and World War II were nationalistic conquests. They were not religiously
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inspired. I mean, you can argue to what extent were World War I and World War II religiously
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inspired. But certainly, Islam was not a main feature of the 30 million people that died
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in World War I or however many million people died in World War II. So the point is that
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we're saying is that, and obviously, you've got concepts in the West like manifest destiny
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and which I think every single president of the United States of America believed in,
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Westward expansion, these kind of things. The point is that the proposition that the ideology
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of the West can fix our problems, this is what we have an issue with. Because what we're
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saying is that if we look at the historical record, there is no evidence of that. In fact,
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what it's shown us is that there's more bloodshed. Individualism has caused more death.
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Like, you know, with all due respect, I know that you do cherish individualism. I'm not saying
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everything is bad about it. But when you have a society deplete of a communitarian ethic,
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it's bereft of a communitarian ethic, then you can have these issues. And so these are
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conversations, and I think you are moving towards a communitarianism. In your newest book,
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you are talking about institutions and these kind of things, and the respectful tradition
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and these kind of things. I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but these are the kinds
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of conversations I think we need to have. But on that point, I think, I don't want this
00:23:07.380
I just want to interject one thing, because I think it's important. I think, Jordan, you're
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very kind. And I understand. I also watched The Message to Muslims, and I thought there were
00:23:17.960
some problems with it, definitely. But when you said there's an elephant in the room that
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I wanted to address, my mind immediately went to videos I've seen of you with some of your
00:23:28.360
friends in the street and suggesting violence and suggesting aggressive actions against other
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communities, which in the West is something that, let's say, in Canada, people don't do that.
00:23:41.640
And that even though there might be civil conflicts, we have a state, we have police,
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we have an apparatus, which is not completely perfect, but which functions to install the
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rules. So when I see someone in the street, surrounded by men wearing masks, who are talking
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about if these other groups come out, you know, they're going to see us and we're going to be
00:24:03.780
there. And I'm looking for Jews and we're talking about blood. And there's these very strange
00:24:10.680
When did I say we're looking for Jews? Do you remember when I said that exact statement?
00:24:17.800
I'd like to get an exact quote. Okay, so I don't remember. I recall...
00:24:21.720
Well, the other one, the one that I definitely saw that you spoke for quite a while was relating
00:24:28.500
So what happened recently? I don't want to go...
00:24:31.360
Okay, well, I think the reason why it's important...
00:24:32.920
I guess the reason why it's important is that I have met... I'm a Christian, very much
00:24:39.120
a Christian. I have many problems with modern Western culture, right? But we are in the
00:24:54.900
And so, to me, the elephant in the room is part... That's part of the elephant in the room.
00:24:59.440
There are many people who told Jordan not to come here because of those videos.
00:25:03.940
Okay, well, there's a lot of people that told me not to have this conversation with Jordan
00:25:08.800
Lots of people don't want to have difficult conversations.
00:25:10.860
Exactly. But what I'm saying with Jordan is that what makes him gallant and brave is
00:25:15.580
that despite those voices that are the voices of disunity, because he's been cancelled more
00:25:20.000
times than I have, yeah? Despite the fact that he's been cancelled in Cambridge University
00:25:24.300
or whatever, I don't care about all these institutions. With all due respect, I know this
00:25:27.700
man is a person of influence. And in my estimation, I see him as one of the most,
00:25:33.000
if not the most influential Western public voice, right? So, for that reason, I speak
00:25:38.060
to him. And for that reason, I don't apologise to anyone for doing so. And I think, in a
00:25:42.960
way, he sees the same thing in me. Maybe not to the same level, but the fact that I'm half
00:25:47.080
his age, he knows what's going to come in 30 years' time. So, he's playing the cards right.
00:25:52.620
And I think, at the end of the day, my voice, my emotions, what I'm saying in the streets
00:25:56.640
of London or Leicester or whatever else is how a lot of Muslim people feel. But don't
00:26:01.140
forget, yes, I'm disagreeable. And I'm not, my temperament is not the temperament of the
00:26:05.120
average Muslim. So, you've got to differentiate between me as an individual, me, Muhammad Hajab
00:26:10.200
as an individual, and Islam. Do you see? If you say, Muhammad Hajab, you are a hypocrite,
00:26:15.620
you are a bad guy, you are violent. So, you know what? That's something I have to look into.
00:26:20.520
Do you know what I mean? If that's your advice to me, that's something I have to look into.
00:26:23.100
Well, I would also say there's no moral advantage in being a pushover either.
00:26:28.620
And so, these things are very hard to calibrate correctly. And so, well, if we come at this
00:26:34.260
in a spirit of mutual ignorance and with some degree of, maybe this is where tolerance is
00:26:40.800
more of an issue. We're going to have to tolerate each other's rough edges and imperfections in order
00:26:45.520
to talk, even if we think that there's something useful to be gleaned. And my sense is that,
00:26:51.280
well, we're called upon to separate the wheat from the chaff. And that's not so much to damn
00:26:56.220
the chaff as it is to gather the wheat. And it seems to me in the biblical stories in the Old
00:27:02.200
Testament, there's an immense emphasis, strange emphasis in some real sense. It's one of the
00:27:07.680
things that makes the text so remarkable on the moral stranger and foreigner. And so, when the society
00:27:15.760
is unstable and shaking in a variety of ways, it's often the moral foreigner who comes in with
00:27:21.880
something wise to say. And I think that's definitely true of those biblical narratives. And it's very
00:27:27.840
interesting that they point them out. But I think it's also true practically. It's like, it's not as
00:27:32.280
if any of us, like we want to have faith in our faith. And we need that because it keeps us together
00:27:38.460
individually and it unites us socially. But then if we insist that my, if I insist that my faith,
00:27:47.560
which is more like my pride in my own belief, is 100% correct, then I've confused myself with
00:27:55.840
my faith. I've confused myself with Christianity, or perhaps you've confused yourself with Islam.
00:28:01.640
And that's a big mistake because... So, let me ask you both a question then. Since we can talk,
00:28:07.520
by the way, one clarification with all the question, I've never asked for violence. And
00:28:10.960
that's an accusation I think that needs to be, you need to look back at. Because I've never said,
00:28:15.680
let's go and do violence. I said that if such and such group come out again, which were a group of
00:28:20.480
armed people, then we'll be there to defend the community. I don't, I've never said in my whole life,
00:28:24.700
and I'll challenge anybody to find anything that's opposite from what I've just said. Now,
00:28:29.320
that's one thing. Second thing I'll say is this, is that, and if it was a violence issue,
00:28:34.000
if I did say that, what's happening with the Metropolitan Police? Why am I not behind bars?
00:28:37.820
Why have there not been a single investigation? It's 210,000 people have watched the video.
00:28:42.600
Unless the police have put their, you know, fingers in their ears, or that they are,
00:28:47.060
if you want to accuse the police of, you know, negligence or incompetence, that's a different story.
00:28:52.600
Let's go to the second point, because you were saying now about this, basically dogmatism,
00:28:56.780
let's just call it for what it is. Like, you know. It's pride in dogmatism, right? And that's
00:29:00.640
something we all have to watch, because it's a hard line to walk, because you want to be an
00:29:04.840
advocate for your faith, but what in the world do you know, right? You're ignorant beyond comprehension.
00:29:10.100
Let me ask a question, and both of you, this is a question to both of you. Is there an ultimate
00:29:13.960
purpose of life? Yeah, sure. What is it? What we're doing here. Which is what? Hopefully trying to make
00:29:22.780
peace. Is that enough? We'll see. Yeah. Because it's better than the alternative. What's the
00:29:30.360
alternative? Hell. Okay. Which we're toying with. I don't mean us. Well, us too. That's for sure. But,
00:29:38.780
you know, things are shaky at the moment on many fronts, and we have this opportunity in front of
00:29:45.360
us, all of us, to have a very abundant world, right? Where everyone has enough, and maybe more
00:29:51.740
than enough. And we're shaky about that. We're not sure that that's acceptable, and we're not sure
00:29:58.580
everybody should have it. We're not sure everybody deserves it, and even ourselves. And we're retreating
00:30:06.040
into our corners, in some real sense. And we're not addressing the elephants under the carpet. And
00:30:10.740
you can't do that. Like, the things we're discussing contentiously now, you know, they make for rough
00:30:17.980
conversations, but they make for a lot rougher streets if you don't talk them out. And you have
00:30:23.060
to do that in a spirit of ignorance. You know, like, I was hoping to come here today, and, well, and listen,
00:30:28.040
I talk a lot. There's my flaw, you know. But I don't know how to feel the right way forward.
00:30:36.840
I think part of it is, well, first of all, to find commonalities. We believe in the fundamental
00:30:44.180
necessity of a uniting book across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. That's not nothing.
00:30:51.960
That's a strange thing to insist upon, and yet we all seem to agree. We believe in a higher and
00:30:58.080
purposeful unity, the necessity of that, and then also in the necessity of putting that above all else.
00:31:04.300
And we also agree that we're not very good at that. But that's the hardest one to get, is that
00:31:10.580
even if you do claim, in some sense, to worship the highest in this monotheistic sense, that doesn't
00:31:20.220
mean you're very good at it. And that's a hard pill to swallow, especially when you're trying to also
00:31:25.060
be a courageous knight of your faith, let's say. It's hard to be properly humble in the face of the
00:31:33.920
divine, but that might be, in some sense, the proper command. I mean, the fact that Islam means
00:31:39.320
submission is a reflection of that, in some sense, right? Just remember who's God here and who isn't.
00:31:45.400
And so, and that's a very hard thing to keep in mind. So when I listen to you, you disagreeable
00:31:50.060
character, I'm trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff, you know, because there's no doubt
00:31:55.760
I have many things to learn, as I learned to some degree when I put out that message.
00:31:59.980
Honestly, I appreciate this part of, like, you know, I learned from your humility, honestly,
00:32:04.280
the way that you come across. And once again, I do appreciate both of you coming here, you
00:32:07.720
know, and I appreciate disagreeability as well. Like, what you've said there is good. I deserve
00:32:11.580
the accountability, just like he does. I don't want to be a person who, you know, who
00:32:14.940
doesn't, can't dish it out, who dishes it out or can't get it himself. I deserve it.
00:32:19.140
What I wanted to say is this to both of you. I want to do a thought experiment, yeah?
00:32:22.180
Yeah. And so imagine you're going to sleep. I don't know where you guys are staying now,
00:32:26.000
what hotel you're staying. You're watching my videos, you know, me with the masks and
00:32:29.320
stuff like that before you go to sleep, subscribe on the channel, whatever you do, yeah?
00:32:32.820
And now you're, after you've, you know, put the dislike and done your negative comments,
00:32:37.580
which I deleted already and put it in the trash, which is what you do is always tweets,
00:32:42.320
and, you know, we can talk about that later. But after that's all happened and you've
00:32:45.480
gone to sleep, you both forgot to sleep now, right? You wake up and you find
00:32:48.400
yourselves on a ship, on a ship, yeah? And people are eating food, people are drinking,
00:32:55.540
people are this and that, so it's happening. Now, what would be the first questions that
00:32:59.980
you would ask to people around you? Would you ask things like, how did I get here?
00:33:07.040
Those seem like the first two good... Those are good questions to ask in general.
00:33:11.060
Where are we? How did we get here? And where are we going?
00:33:13.860
Beautiful. That's what I wanted to actually get to, because this is what Heidegger, you know,
00:33:16.880
Martin Heidegger, he's a controversial figure in his old, right? Okay, but he've described us as the
00:33:21.560
thrownness of life. Yeah. Because we're chucked into life, we're thrown into life, right?
00:33:25.740
So, the fact now that we're in this world, these questions that we would be asking if we were on
00:33:32.320
a ship and we're just chucked on a ship are the same very questions, like you said, you know,
00:33:36.600
that we would be asking if we were in this world. Where did we come from? Where are we going?
00:33:41.720
I think if we can't get these two questions right, nihilism will persist.
00:33:48.100
You're a nihilistic expert. You've spoken a lot about nihilism. I think if we can't get those...
00:33:52.680
He's a counter-nihilistic expert. I'm not a nihilist. If you want, ask my...
00:33:57.300
What I think my purpose, the purpose is, is to be united with God.
00:34:01.020
Okay, beautiful. Yeah, beautiful. Okay, so from the Islamic perspective, it's this, right?
00:34:05.740
First of all, ask these three questions. Where did I come from? Where am I going? What am I doing here?
00:34:10.620
What is the purpose of life? What is it? And the answer is, we came from a creator, okay?
00:34:17.940
So, we can approach this in whatever argument you like. I'm doing a PhD in contingency argument.
00:34:22.280
You can do anything you want. You can do it, for example, through the fact that the universe is
00:34:26.020
regular and stable and uniform and possesses life. What's the best explanation for that?
00:34:30.840
Is it knowledge or not knowledge? So, we would say it's knowledge, right? Or as we say it's a creative
00:34:34.620
capacity of some sort. We came from this creative capacity. We came from this knowledge force,
00:34:38.440
right? So, that's the first thing we would say. We came from this force, this higher power.
00:34:43.020
Where are we going? We're going back to the higher power, right? And we're going back to the higher
00:34:47.320
power with our deeds, which we have to be responsible for, which is exactly, it's a hallmark
00:34:51.520
of what you stand for. And that's, I believe, genuinely, that's why you're asking why are so many
00:34:56.420
people listening to you? Because we reject original sin. What would you respect? Original sin says
00:35:01.500
that one man gave us a sin, the other man took it away. Basically, I mean, we're fallen
00:35:08.620
creatures, and then Jesus, you've got to believe in a sola fide. You believe in whatever you
00:35:12.360
know about Christ. I'm Orthodox, so I don't believe that either. Oh, fair enough. Okay,
00:35:15.080
fine. I don't believe in original sin the way you described it, but that's fine.
00:35:18.060
Fine. No worries. Eastern Orthodox, yeah? Yeah. Okay, fine. But the issue is that this...
00:35:23.500
I didn't say I believed in it either. I just said that the concept of original sin is an expression
00:35:30.340
of this problem that we're describing, which is that we're all burdened with something
00:35:35.280
approximating, well, the thrownness and this ambivalent relationship we have with the atrocity
00:35:40.920
of history. And that's worse, eh? Because if you study the atrocity of history with any
00:35:46.120
degree of seriousness, you have to take account of the fact that people like you did it. And
00:35:52.340
you might think, well, I wouldn't do it. It's like, yeah. I get you. I wouldn't be so
00:35:56.500
sure about that. For sure. I mean, you know, you were talking about the kind of... You
00:36:00.880
were talking about the suffering. And obviously, one of the major sufferings is the Holocaust.
00:36:05.800
I was reading the book, Meaningful Life, Victor Franco, I'm sure you're aware of it, where
00:36:09.080
he then produced logotherapy and all these kind of things. And it goes back to what Nietzsche
00:36:13.100
said. You know, if you have a why, almost any how is possible. You know?
00:36:16.680
Bearable. Yeah. If you have a why, almost any how is possible. So it goes back to... Everything
00:36:20.280
goes back to purpose. Logotherapy. Yeah? If you have a purpose, then everything
00:36:25.400
is possible. That's why I think that you can do the best as a human species, yeah? In
00:36:30.080
the human condition, if your purpose is transcendental. It's higher than the physical, the material.
00:36:36.160
And for us, the purpose is mentioned in chapter 51, verse 19 of the Quran, which is,
00:36:39.660
وَمَا خَلَقْتُ الْجِنُّ الْإِنْسِ إِلَّا لِيَابَدُونَ
00:36:41.360
We have not created human beings and jinn, except for that they may worship me. What is
00:36:45.500
worship? It's the epitome. The higher point of submission is the epitome of love as well.
00:36:51.360
Jonathan has an interesting take on that, too, that has to do with celebration, which
00:36:57.080
I think is psychologically appropriate. Do you want to... I don't want to put you on
00:37:01.300
the spot, but it's something I've been struggling to understand more. I've attended some orthodox
00:37:08.260
ceremonies with Jonathan and also on my own, and he's very perspicacious when it comes to
00:37:15.000
describing the role of both worship and ritual. And so there's an element... Anyways, I'll let
00:37:21.480
No, I agree. I agree that worship is also the manner in which we bind together. And so
00:37:26.780
without something we celebrate together, then we don't. And so we have different levels
00:37:31.760
of what we celebrate. We can celebrate our families, the things that bind us, but ultimately
00:37:36.840
that has to reach all the way up into something which is beyond.
00:37:40.260
I think that's actually very powerful. And in fact, the very first lines of the Quran is
00:37:45.200
Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen, which is all praise and thanks belong to God, Lord of the
00:37:49.960
world. All praise and all thanks. And this is a kind of celebration. This is a kind of
00:37:54.480
praise. You know, we agree that praising God at the highest level, celebrating God, I
00:38:02.080
Well, I would say in some sense, if we're doing that, well, there was some comments at
00:38:08.360
And you opened this event with music, and I've been beginning to open my events with
00:38:13.320
music. And part of the reason that that's very much worthwhile and has to do with this
00:38:18.300
drum beat that underlies everything is that music is a manifestation of something like
00:38:23.900
the joyful spirit of harmonious play. And it's not semantic, right? It grips you and
00:38:31.100
I've heard you say something before about this. You said that music was impervious to
00:38:35.940
refutation. It's impervious to Russian. The meaning of music is impervious to
00:38:40.900
Yeah, I think that was a very powerful way of playing it.
00:38:42.200
It's something, man. It's something to know. You know, and so with musical manner in which
00:38:48.040
the Quran is presented, a major part of that is the music. And the music speaks. We know
00:38:54.800
the music speaks of layers of patterned harmony. And you talked about the individualism of the
00:39:01.660
West. And I think that there's a flaw in that particularized conception that needs to be
00:39:12.320
addressed by something that's more approximating and communitarian ethos. And I think you can
00:39:16.980
understand that relationship to music. Because, look, to some degree, the three of us can sit
00:39:22.680
on stage and everyone in the audience. We can be comfortable at the moment psychologically.
00:39:26.380
Yes. So we're not too anxious and we're kind of engaged. Because there's a certain degree
00:39:36.200
I'll say he's known my dark secrets about, you know, my violence.
00:39:38.260
There's some fractiousness, right? But we're able to integrate that. And so that means we
00:39:42.300
can remain calm. And so one of the things that indicates is that part of our ability to remain
00:39:46.840
calm and focused is dependent on social integration. So you have to ask yourself, well, could you be
00:39:53.380
sane if your marriage was insane? Could you be sane if your relationship with your children
00:40:00.060
was too fractious? Could you be sane if you had no friends? If you didn't integrate yourself into
00:40:05.780
the community and maybe the state and then maybe a higher vision? And as far as I can tell, the
00:40:10.360
answer to that is, no, you can't be sane by yourself. It's not merely a matter of psychological
00:40:16.660
integration. It's not merely a matter of the isolated individual. And of course, we understand
00:40:22.700
that in the West, although perhaps not as well as we should formally, because we'll punish
00:40:27.880
criminals, for example, by putting them in solitary confinement. And that's another indication
00:40:33.680
of the impossibility of maybe if you were an expert meditator and a religious man, you could
00:40:39.880
tolerate the solitude, but you probably wouldn't be a criminal then. So my point is, is that I
00:40:45.520
view this process of integration as a multi-layered process that involves the integration of the
00:40:51.480
community all the way up to the highest place. And that highest place has to be a unity, as Jonathan
00:40:57.160
pointed out, or we're divided. And so we might want to seek amongst us as much as we can for
00:41:04.920
a common unity. At least start with that. And so, and that's what we're trying to do in this
00:41:10.720
Yes, but unity is different to uniformity. So I say the difference being is that, you
00:41:15.780
know, in the Islamic discussion or discourse, it's like, there is this, there is a verse
00:41:20.920
You have your religion, we have ours. There is, we can demarcate and still tolerate. That's
00:41:32.880
No, I think we can. I mean, that's the thing. Going back to the message to Muslims, I think
00:41:36.260
this is where... Can I ask you a question? Have you ever been to a Muslim country?
00:41:41.500
I've been to Morocco, and I've been to Turkey, and have I been to any other Muslim countries?
00:41:53.380
Go to a Muslim country with a Christian population. I'm originally from Egypt, yeah?
00:42:00.800
Yeah, we've had them for 1,400 years. I mean, they were there before the Muslims came, right?
00:42:04.500
And the point is that if you go to Ghana, go to Nigeria, this bleak image of Muslims
00:42:10.060
and Christians kind of fighting each other, I don't think that's what's really going on.
00:42:13.440
I'm not saying that there's no grievance there when the Christian community is in Muslim
00:42:16.680
majority lands. That would be a lie, and that would be false, and that can easily be refuted.
00:42:21.300
What I am saying is that it's not as bad as you think. If you go to these countries,
00:42:24.500
you will not find... I do not think you will find what's going on, for example, you're
00:42:28.300
talking about Hindutva, in India with the Muslim minorities and a Hindu supposedly,
00:42:32.160
you know, majority, which is a peaceful religion, what's going on there? What's going on in China
00:42:36.460
with the Muslim minority there? Or, for example, may I add, like, sorry to say, but what's
00:42:42.200
Well, I don't want to paint any large-scale endeavor with the brush that's, let's say,
00:42:51.060
dipped in the blood of its worst excesses. I don't think that's helpful, because then
00:42:55.460
we're all irredeemable in some real sense. I think it's much wiser for us to see what we can
00:43:04.560
jointly celebrate and see if we can manage that in something like a spirit of ignorance and hope.
00:43:11.520
You know, because one of the things I learned a long time ago, it was very helpful for me as a
00:43:15.020
clinician, was that if everything wasn't perfect around me all the time, it was probably, at least
00:43:21.560
in part because I was much less than I could conceivably be. And one of the things I learned
00:43:26.480
from Carl Jung, who's a great thinker, was that what you need most will be found where you least
00:43:32.000
want to look. And yes, well, and it's almost by definition, right? Because you can imagine that
00:43:37.320
you're most likely to be most ignorant about what you're most afraid of and most contemptuous of.
00:43:43.060
And so, by definition, that's the last place you want to look. And if you're an advocate of a given
00:43:48.060
religious faith, one of the last places you might want to look is in the wisdom of an alternative
00:43:52.780
faith. I agree. But, you know, that's, who are you to be such a committed advocate of a faith that's
00:44:01.220
so complex that there's no way that someone like you can understand it? And I mean that of your own
00:44:06.480
faith. And so, it's not so obvious that the stranger you think is the devil doesn't have
00:44:12.540
something to say. I get you, but yeah, I once heard you quote Carl Jung, because obviously you
00:44:16.920
mentioned him a lot in your books, and I learned a lot from you about Carl Jung. Yeah. That he stated
00:44:22.120
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you're in. That's shopify.com slash jbp. The West are technological giants but moral
00:45:36.020
dwarfs. In comparison, yes. Yeah, yeah. And that's the problem all over the world increasingly,
00:45:41.860
right? We're technological giants but moral midgets. To some extent. But what I was going to say here is
00:45:46.320
that going back to Carl Jung here, because for example, and going back to the issue of purpose,
00:45:52.520
purpose, yeah? If we're speaking about purpose, I watched your discussion of Sam Harris and you
00:45:59.560
were speaking about your kind of- The last one? No, there was one that you'd done, I don't know,
00:46:02.620
it wasn't that famous. You weren't speaking to him like this. But there was one point of it which
00:46:07.240
really was like, it gave me an insight into your, I don't want to be a psychologist here, right?
00:46:12.560
But maybe I dare say it gave me an insight into your psychological state. Because Sam Harris,
00:46:19.280
he said to you, he said, your conception of pragmatism, that truth is malleable or whatever,
00:46:25.580
it's not one capital T truth like correspondence. Well, there's no, I said more that I don't believe
00:46:31.480
that the most fundamental truth is objective in the scientific sense. And I don't think it can be.
00:46:37.260
Not that objective truth isn't useful. So in that sense, your perspective, and you know this as well,
00:46:43.320
is more epistemologically pragmatist rather than correspondence theory, right? So correspondence theory
00:46:47.960
is that one truth out there? I think correspondence theories have to be nested under
00:46:52.400
pragmatic theories in some real sense. So you're saying the same thing as the American pragmatist
00:46:56.120
said, Charles Pierce and William James. Yes, that's right. Yes, very much. So what I was going to say
00:46:59.040
with that, he said, if you believe in this, it will be at your peril. And you know what you said?
00:47:03.280
You responded, you retorted, you said, it has been at my peril. You said, it has not. Let me,
00:47:08.560
let's focus on this because this is actually deep. You said, it has been at my peril.
00:47:15.240
No, no, no, no, no. But think about this for a second because I heard your voice and I heard,
00:47:18.860
now these words stuck in my mind, yeah? You said, it has been at my peril. Now let me,
00:47:24.220
let me submit something to you today. Could it be that it's at your peril? Because if you don't
00:47:29.340
believe in truth with a capital T in the correspondence theory sense, that there is a
00:47:34.300
God and that's a true statement, just like two plus two equals four is a true statement. Just like,
00:47:37.260
just like the geocentric model, the heliocentric model is a true statement. In that sense,
00:47:41.400
there is a God out there and he created the world. He created you. He's sustaining the
00:47:45.840
universe. He is maintaining the universe. There is a true statement and that is in a
00:47:49.400
correspondence theory sense. If you don't have that level of certainty, then you will end up
00:47:56.240
being in existential angst and you will end up being depressed because that's what the
00:48:03.040
وَمَنْ أَعْرَضْ عَنْ ذِكْرِ فَإِنَّ لَهُمْ عَيْشَةً ضَنْكَةً
00:48:07.160
Whoever trans, whoever swerves away from my remembrance will have a depressed life.
00:48:13.480
So for us, I think that every, well, I think almost by definition, when you veer from a path
00:48:19.200
oriented towards the highest unity that you fall apart, it's by definition. Now, I don't know
00:48:26.680
what that means specifically with regards to a correspondence theory because the correspondence
00:48:33.620
theorists tend to be more oriented towards a materialist viewpoint and that doesn't seem to
00:48:39.440
me to work out very well when discussing something like God. Do I think that we strive towards a
00:48:46.020
higher unity, that that unity is real and that it's necessary?
00:48:49.680
No, but there's no contradiction in having correspondence theory in dualism or idealism.
00:48:53.880
It doesn't have to be materialism because that would indicate the truth, the truth of
00:49:01.000
Well, I would say then my answer to that is that I try to act as if that's true. And I think I say I
00:49:08.400
act as if it's true because I don't, I'm not in a position to make any final judgments in some real
00:49:16.360
sense, but I am in a position to stake my life on certain faith-based propositions.
00:49:23.960
That's what you can do. That doesn't mean you're right, but that's what you have at your disposal.
00:49:28.280
And so I am trying to do that to feel the proper way forward in this spirit of, let's say, playful
00:49:36.440
unity and to put that above all else, which is partly why I also said that I did it at my peril.
00:49:41.960
The thing is, what I would say is that if you take the proposition that truth is utility,
00:49:45.540
yeah, and what is useful is that which is true. That's basically the American pragmatist stance.
00:49:56.040
That's what Charles Pierce said almost by word.
00:49:59.400
The pragmatists are more like engineers, which is, well, you can't build a perfect bridge,
00:50:05.440
because what do you know? You can't build anything perfect, but you can build a bridge
00:50:09.880
that's a bridge insofar as it will stand up and allow you to walk across it for 400 years.
00:50:15.080
And so, and then the notion there is, well, it's not perfect. It doesn't correspond precisely
00:50:22.360
to the ultimate nature of reality, let's say, but it's good enough to move you from point
00:50:29.140
Yes, but going back to Viktor Frankl and the idea of meaning, what I'm saying is, I know
00:50:34.580
you're a psychoanalyst. From the Quranic paradigm, this will not be enough. Meaning, based on your
00:50:42.280
current paradigm, according to the Islamic diagnosis, you will be depressed. Why? Because
00:50:47.920
your purpose is not strong enough. Do you see the point?
00:50:51.920
I know that sounds a bit intrusive, so I do apologize for that.
00:50:54.680
No, I don't think it is intrusive, because I think if you deviate from that orientation
00:51:00.820
towards unity, then I know this from a psychological perspective. If you deviate from orientation
00:51:07.900
toward the highest unity, which you might think about as the highest goal, two things happen.
00:51:12.800
One is, you experience less positive emotion, so joy and enthusiasm and engagement, because
00:51:19.560
positive emotion is experienced in relation to a goal, not as a consequence of achieving
00:51:25.660
So if you're pursuing the highest goal, then you're celebrating most intently. And then
00:51:30.560
if the goal you're pursuing isn't unified, then it's multiplicitous, and then you're confused
00:51:35.740
and anxious and unstable and depressed. So I would say that's true by definition.
00:51:39.800
What I was reading recently, I've read all your books, and I even read some of your peer-reviewed
00:51:44.440
work, because when I was going to speak to you, then I said, you know what, I'm going
00:51:48.140
to do my homework. So I read everything. One of the things that you said one time in the
00:51:53.440
maps of meaning, you started off the book by saying, when you were a young lad, I don't
00:51:58.640
know how young you were. You said that you found the doctrines of Christianity incomprehensible
00:52:06.320
and absurd. Yeah? And you also said that you found you had some kind of issue with Christianity
00:52:11.980
because of the Genesis narrative and how incongruent it was with scientific narratives.
00:52:17.840
You went to a pastor, you said, or a church cleric or something, and then you left the church.
00:52:22.180
Now, I've got a question. Do you still have the same position, or have you changed your position?
00:52:26.280
Well, I've changed my position a lot. I was only 13 then, you know, and I was caught up
00:52:32.100
in the battle, you know, insofar it was manifested in me when I was 13, I was caught in the battle
00:52:40.640
between enlightenment rationality and traditional narrative belief. I had no idea how to reconcile
00:52:46.200
those two things. Do you feel like you can do that now?
00:52:49.240
I'm doing my best to reconcile. Yes, and I think, well, I certainly can do it a lot more
00:52:54.040
than I did when I was 13. Let me give you an example, right? This point, when you were 13,
00:52:58.580
I think you were thinking straight. I'll be, I'm sorry to be very straight.
00:53:02.300
It's hard to believe that someone is disagreeable with you as you manage that.
00:53:06.480
Because someone with an IQ of 180 or whatever you have, yeah, someone of your intelligence,
00:53:10.540
when you were 13, you probably had an IQ of, I don't know, 120 or something, yeah. So you
00:53:14.520
were operating like my friend over here, Ali Dawes, on his level, we're at the age of 13.
00:53:19.640
But what I was going to say was that, you know, the reason why I think you were,
00:53:24.500
because look at the Trinity, for example, look at the schisms, and this goes to your
00:53:27.620
specialism, that the idea of three all-powerful entities, that Jesus is all-powerful, that
00:53:33.760
the Father is all-powerful, the Son is all-powerful, and the Holy Spirit is all-powerful, but there's
00:53:36.380
not all, there's not three all-powerfuls, there's one all-powerful. You have one ultimately
00:53:41.540
willing being, which is a person, which is Jesus, and another person, which is ultimately
00:53:45.980
willing, which is the Son. The Quran states about this, it says,
00:53:48.300
In chapter 23, verse 91, it says that, Allah has not taken any Son, and He did not have
00:54:01.260
any Creator with Him. Had that been the case, they would have stripped one another for what,
00:54:07.800
they would have competed and tried to outstrip one another for power. Meaning this idea of
00:54:12.640
three all-powerful persons is unintelligible, to say the least. The idea that Jesus Christ
00:54:19.000
exhibits two natures, I know that there are schisms, and there's difference of opinion
00:54:23.440
among Christians, but the fact that you have this human nature, where Jesus is walking and
00:54:30.300
He sees the tree, and He can't eat from the tree, He doesn't know that the tree is in season
00:54:34.920
or not, or that He doesn't know when the hour is, or whatever it may be. The Quran says
00:54:40.440
Him and his mom used to eat food. This proposition that they are limited and unlimited at the same
00:54:46.240
time, it's a contradiction. It's an affront to logic. This will cause you cognitive dissonance,
00:54:52.700
because if you want to be a rational actor, and you want to be…
00:54:58.820
But you do when you do your scientific experiments.
00:55:05.640
Because rationality should be subordinated to something above it, and I'm trying to subordinate
00:55:10.940
myself to that. And so my reaction to what you're saying is that it's an… this isn't
00:55:19.260
an insult. I'm telling you what my reaction is.
00:55:23.620
I find the discussion, that discussion, as soon as it started, I found that less interesting
00:55:30.480
than what we were doing before. It was harder for me to focus on. And I think the reason
00:55:34.540
for that is that it transforms to some… and I'm not saying this isn't necessary at some
00:55:41.480
times, but it transforms the transcendent into something like an intellectual and propositional
00:55:47.700
discussion. And so in some sense, we're debating perhaps not the fine points of theology,
00:55:52.760
because they're more like the blunt points of theology, but there's something about that
00:55:57.640
that isn't what I want to do with you, you know? And it isn't that it's not necessary.
00:56:05.340
So let me flip it around to some degree. So one of the things I'm very curious about is
00:56:10.320
obviously the figure of Christ is contentious. And so the Jews don't know what to make of Christ
00:56:17.360
in some fundamental sense, because he seems like the last, he seems like, and what would
00:56:23.780
you, a continuation of the prophetic tradition in some real sense, plus he was Jewish. So
00:56:28.300
that makes things complicated. And then, of course, the Christians put the figure of Christ
00:56:32.400
as central in some real sense, but that begs the question of the relationship between Christ
00:56:37.840
and God. And then in the Muslim community, Christ is also a central figure. And so I'm curious
00:56:43.820
about that. And we could say we have doctrinal differences about what constitutes that centrality.
00:56:49.160
It's like, fair enough. And I would also not say that I understand what that centrality means.
00:56:56.740
So one of the ways I would understand that, let's say, is that in the Western tradition,
00:57:03.060
and I don't know to what degree this is true in the Muslim tradition, one of the attributes of what
00:57:09.280
Christ is, psychologically, is the Logos. And so if we're engaged in dialogue, which is dual Logos,
00:57:20.100
then we're embodying the spirit of something like mutual enlightenment. And that's then the presence
00:57:27.000
of that spirit in the genuine confines of temporal reality, right? It's something like the infinite
00:57:36.000
descending to the finite to illuminate us. And to the degree that we can have a dialogue in good
00:57:41.980
faith, which is also a religious notion, then we can engage in that process of Dialogos,
00:57:47.980
and that transforms and redeems us. And then when I say, well, do I believe that? I say, well,
00:57:52.900
it isn't just that I believe it as a proposition. It's that I can tell when it's happening. And so can
00:57:58.820
you, I think. It's like, you're going to see that this conversation will ebb and flow, you know? And
00:58:03.840
some of the time it's going to grip you. You think we're at the heart of the matter. And sometimes
00:58:08.000
your attention is going to wander. Your attention is going to wander when we're off the path. And
00:58:12.660
so I would say that to the degree that you and I are communicating, this is a religious way of
00:58:18.080
thinking about it, is that we're doing our best to embody the spirit of the Logos. And if that's
00:58:22.300
working, then we're making progress. And I know that in the Western tradition, that's part of what has
00:58:28.060
been conceptualized as the fundamental attribute of the figure of Christ. And I know that Christ is
00:58:33.660
central in the Muslim tradition. And so one of the things I would want to know is not how we
00:58:38.840
differ doctrinally, because I don't even think I'm qualified to debate you on that case.
00:58:45.040
Well, Jonathan might have some things to say, but what I would like to know instead is,
00:58:50.180
why do you believe that the figure of Christ is central in some sense? Or maybe I've got that
00:58:55.760
wrong, although I don't think so. Why do you think the figure of Christ is central both to
00:59:00.580
the Muslim faith and the Christian faith? And what do you think that says about what we share
00:59:05.620
in common? Because I really don't understand that. It's a mystery to me.
00:59:08.800
Okay. So Jesus Christ, if secular historians will look at him and differ on his existence or not,
00:59:14.760
the majority, to be fair, do believe he existed, right? Even secular historians, atheists and
00:59:23.240
Yeah, it's the simplest, of course, yeah. So I believe that, first of all, Jesus Christ existed,
00:59:27.120
which in the modern age is worth noting, right? Muslims actually, Muslims are the only other
00:59:31.980
major world religion who believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as the prophet.
00:59:36.780
Right, right. And this is a strange thing, so we should definitely be trying to sort that out.
00:59:41.660
All right. So this is the first point of commonality. We believe in Jesus Christ. We believe in his
00:59:45.620
miracles, that he cured the blind with God's permission, that he raised the dead with God's
00:59:49.760
permission. We believe that he even, you know, he created some things which in the gospel of
00:59:54.900
Thomas and the Bible, like, you know, but for example, the clay bird and so on, that he blew into it
00:59:59.960
and it became an actual bird, that he cured the leper with God's permission. We believe that he was
01:00:04.520
one of the mightiest human beings that have ever lived on the earth. And we believe that his mother
01:00:08.700
was the best woman who ever lived on the earth. The Quran actually explicitly says that.
01:00:14.200
Right. And so that is the first thing we believe. When we look at the Quranic verses relating to Jesus
01:00:20.200
Christ, we don't look at those metaphorically. No orthodox Muslim normatively looks at those
01:00:27.300
in an etiological way. It's not etiology for us. It's history. So we believe that this is
01:00:33.740
actually historical. That's the first thing. And the reason why I mentioned that to you is because
01:00:37.120
I listen to all of your biblical series. I think a lot of Muslims have. And you know that right here.
01:00:42.740
A lot of people like it. And because obviously...
01:00:46.080
And no, and it's not very strange if you know the Quran, because the Quran actually tells us to go
01:00:49.420
to the people of the book and to listen to them and to, you know, and you'll find in exegesis,
01:00:53.820
like for example, Tafsir ibn Kathir, like one of the staple exegesis of the Quran, they use
01:01:00.260
biblical verses all the time. Let's go to the people of the book. Let's see what information
01:01:04.260
they have. At-Tabari mentions what you call Israeliyat, which is basically passages from
01:01:08.880
the Bible, passages from the Torah and so on like that, from the biblical tradition and
01:01:13.340
from the Torah. So it's not really, it's not abnormal for Muslim people to be interested
01:01:18.920
in Christian explanations. That's been going on for 1,300 years. Yeah. That's the first thing.
01:01:23.240
And the second thing is that, why, because symbolism is important. And you've mentioned,
01:01:28.320
for example, Egyptian symbolism. You mentioned, for example, Orysus and, I don't know, Isis
01:01:31.860
and all this, not that Isis. I know you're thinking, he already thinks I'm a hooligan.
01:01:36.900
But you know, the Egyptian god Isis, I have to make that very clear. And so on. Yeah.
01:01:42.680
So my question would be therefore, before we talk about symbolism, because a symbol can be
01:01:47.620
something, you can have a symbol and an expression of something which exists at the same time.
01:01:52.620
For example, you can have something which is not metaphoric, because you can't have a
01:01:56.040
metaphor and non-metaphoric. But you can have a symbol and something which doesn't exist.
01:01:59.200
For example, I say that you are a symbol for Western, I don't know, whatever it is, intellectualism.
01:02:04.200
Yeah. Possibly. I mean, this debate is, Jordan Peterson, a symbol for Western intellectualism.
01:02:08.300
Debate. And he exists. Now here's the point. Like, you know, you know that there are central
01:02:14.620
doctrines to Christianity, like the crucifixion, the ascension, the resurrection, and all the above.
01:02:19.560
Right? These are doctrines. How do we look at these doctrines? Because the reason why I'm
01:02:24.720
asking you, I think you are qualified, or at least you have some, because you did mention
01:02:27.320
in your lectures that you are taking the approach of the Alexandrian school, which is like origin
01:02:32.960
of Alexandra and his Jewish teacher, Philo, and these kinds of people, who take what you
01:02:36.380
call the spiritualizing text. They spiritualize the text. They were known, the Alexandrian school
01:02:40.620
was known for spiritualizing the text. And they were aberrational in that sense. And that's
01:02:45.480
one of the reasons why they were seeing this heretics by, I think, all the churches.
01:02:49.700
I mean, just origin. But origin said some things which are heretical, but he has massive influence
01:02:56.540
on church fathers that are respected. But to your point, let's say the notion that facts
01:03:04.280
have meaning, that is something that as Christians we should believe.
01:03:08.860
Right. God created the world with a meaningful structure, so the world lays itself out in
01:03:13.560
a way that when we see it, we can see the meaning.
01:03:15.680
Exactly. And this is something which all types of Christians will agree with. Catholics will
01:03:19.140
agree with it, Eastern Orthodox and Protestants. All of them will say, you must believe in these
01:03:22.840
doctrines as happening. You cannot believe in them as symbol. You cannot believe. So the
01:03:27.800
So when I hear something like that, then the question that arises for me is, what do you mean
01:03:34.620
happening? And so let me just unpack that a little bit. So I did a lecture last night at
01:03:39.860
the Apollo on the story of Cain and Abel. And one of the things that I proposed was that
01:03:46.320
not only did that story happen, but it's always happening. It always happened. It's happening
01:03:55.420
right now, and it's always going to happen into the future. And so I would say to some degree,
01:04:00.440
the mere reduction of these profound stories to a historical reality is an underestimate of their
01:04:10.080
truth, because they're a strange kind of truth, because they're the truth that always happened
01:04:16.160
and is happening now and always will happen. So Cain and Abel's story, for example, you have
01:04:22.220
a story of the eternal battle between something like the spirit of joyful and appropriate sacrifice,
01:04:29.460
which is characterized as Abel, and the spirit of resentful resentment against the structure of
01:04:36.080
existence as a consequence of thrownness and the shaking of the fist at God. And that's always
01:04:42.180
happening, because for all of us, you know, we look at our lives and we think, well, should we be
01:04:46.600
happy to be alive? Should we be grateful to be alive? And the answer to that is often, but not always.
01:04:53.820
And if you put someone in the position of Job and he's being tortured to death by fate and tragedy and
01:05:00.120
catastrophe and malevolence, he might well come to a point where he's motivated to take the resentful
01:05:06.980
path and shake his fist at God. And we have those spirits inside of us warring constantly. And so
01:05:12.960
when, and so then when I look at a story like Cain and Abel, I think, well, the question, did that
01:05:19.880
happen? Begs the question, what do you mean by happen? Because when you are dealing with
01:05:26.780
fundamental realities and you pose a question, you have to understand that the reality of the
01:05:32.920
concepts of your question, when you're digging that deep are just as questionable about as what
01:05:39.520
you're questioning. You know, so people say to me, what do you, do you believe in God? And I think,
01:05:46.520
okay, there's a couple of mysteries in that question. What do you mean do? What do you mean
01:05:52.180
you? What do you mean believe? And what do you mean God? And you say as the questioner, well,
01:05:59.140
we already know what all those things mean except belief in God. And I think, no, if we're going to
01:06:04.960
get down to the fundamental brass tacks, we don't really know what any of those things mean. And so
01:06:11.280
for me, belief, for example, is often reflected not so much in proposition as it is in action. If I
01:06:17.620
want to know what you believe, I could ask you, and hopefully you have some idea about what you
01:06:22.660
believe, but I'd rather see what you do. Well, can I, can I, can I push back a little bit with this?
01:06:27.300
Because like, for example, when I was reading your book, your newest book, actually this time,
01:06:31.560
yeah, 12 More Rules. They're very good books, by the way. I mean, I recommend them. Thank you, sir.
01:06:35.020
Honestly. Buy them if you haven't already bought them. I would specifically recommend the 12 Rules
01:06:42.500
for Life. Because 12 More Rules, I have some criticisms of it. But it's good. It's a good
01:06:47.360
book. But one thing you did say about it. It's really hard to believe that you're disagreeable.
01:06:52.180
Really, yeah. So one thing you mentioned in the book, you were talking about some psychological
01:06:59.280
theory, which I don't forget. I forget what it is right now. You mentioned something. You said
01:07:04.660
there's, you know, the problem with this such and such theory is that it doesn't have
01:07:09.460
any evidence. Full stop. Categorical. All this, what you're doing now, you didn't mention
01:07:14.740
that. You didn't say, well, it depends on what you mean by this. It depends on me. Sorry
01:07:18.060
to say, yeah. But it depends on what you mean by this. It depends on what you mean by this.
01:07:21.740
You become postmodern all of a sudden. It's like you've become now.
01:07:24.960
Yeah, that's a definite. Oh, yeah. That's a definite. Look, I think that's partly why the postmodern
01:07:30.940
critique, in some sense, was inevitable is because we started to dig down into something
01:07:38.360
like, say, the meaning of stories, because that's really where the postmodernists got
01:07:42.700
their impetus, because the postmodern literary theorists, sorry to drag this up, but it's
01:07:48.420
relevant. They hit a mystery, which was, well, if you read a given text, story, or even
01:07:56.760
a paragraph, and you get 100 people to offer their opinion on it, in some way you get 100
01:08:02.920
different opinions. And you can tell that if you assign students to write an essay, let's
01:08:08.360
say. And so then a problem emerges is if, well, if there's 100 different opinions, and
01:08:13.200
some of them even appear to oppose one another, how do you know what the true significance is
01:08:20.320
of the text? And then worse, how do you even know that there is a true significance? And
01:08:26.160
then that, and then you think, okay, well, that's a major problem. And then here's a worse
01:08:31.320
problem. Imagine you have an assemblage of texts, like the biblical corpus, let's say, which
01:08:36.880
is really a library, and it's in some sense canonical, right? Well, if you can't decide on
01:08:43.040
the fixed meaning of even a given paragraph, how in the world can you make the statement that
01:08:49.160
this selection of texts, which are much more complicated than just paragraphs, is somehow
01:08:56.480
canonical? Now, the answer to that is, this is the answer. We don't know. Now, the problem
01:09:03.900
with the postmodernists wasn't that they figured out that this was a mystery, because not only
01:09:10.560
is this the mystery of textual interpretation, which is a major mystery, how do we understand
01:09:15.080
a text? But it's also in the mystery of perception, because at the same time, people who are investigating
01:09:20.640
perception, Jonathan has been talking about this with John Verveke, a cognitive scientist,
01:09:25.440
at the same time, scientists on the perceptual front in AI labs and neuroscientists were discovering
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One discount per household. Well, so what's the point of all this? Well, the point of all this is
01:11:10.860
that if you delve into questions deeply enough, you do run into the problem of perception and the
01:11:18.060
multitude and multiplicity of perception. And that's a real problem. And so when I do something like I
01:11:24.560
interrogate a question, well, the postmodern problem does emerge. Now, I've been trying to work
01:11:30.740
out solutions to that. And Jonathan and I and John Vervecki have been discussing this a lot.
01:11:36.420
The postmodernists were correct, I think, in their diagnosis of the problem. They leapt right to the
01:11:42.440
idea that the way we solve the problem of perception is by exercising power. They just took a Marxist
01:11:50.380
When you say they here, who are you talking about in particular?
01:11:51.860
Mostly the French intellectual types like Derrida and Foucault.
01:11:54.880
I would disagree with this, by the way. I don't think Derrida or Foucault took a Marxist
01:12:01.120
Well, Jonathan, you want to have at that for a bit?
01:12:03.300
But that's not my fight. It's a worthless victory for me.
01:12:08.520
Okay, well, we can either delve into that or not.
01:12:11.960
Let me just say something, Jordan, about what you were saying. That is, I think that
01:12:16.120
when there's this question of, do you believe in God? I think one of the problems that
01:12:20.220
Jordan, no, the difficulty that Jordan faced was faced with a modern Protestantism which
01:12:27.980
was very propositional. And it was like just, I believe, and it's just a bunch of things
01:12:32.480
that you believe in in terms of thinking. And I do think that what Jordan is trying to
01:12:38.980
grasp at and trying to understand is actually probably closer to something that most traditional
01:12:43.920
Muslims would believe, which is that if you say that you submit to God, but you don't
01:12:55.220
Yeah, and the question is, why is it empty, right? If you said the words, why is it still
01:13:00.520
And so I think that what he's grasping at is to find a more encompassing, it's like,
01:13:08.720
Yeah, okay. No, but I get what you're saying. But what I'm saying is this, is that the attitude
01:13:13.260
that you have towards scientific investigation is that which is more congruent with a correspondence
01:13:21.220
Right? So you simply ask the question that, by the way, the Quran asks. And one of the
01:13:25.760
central questions the Quran asks us to ask Christians and Jews is,
01:13:32.900
Bring your evidence if you're truthful. This is the central question that Muslims are asked
01:13:37.960
to ask. The same question that you, as a scientist, ask, we have to ask as well, right?
01:13:42.660
I know I'm using the word ask a lot here. What I'm saying is, this is where the cognitive
01:13:47.980
It does, it does come in. That is part of what's torn the West apart on, say, on the
01:13:53.980
basis of the Enlightenment versus the religious tradition, to the degree that that's a conflict.
01:13:58.180
Just to add to this point is, for example, going back to Origin of Alexandria, yeah?
01:14:01.980
Origin of Alexandria, because he has this hermeneutical dilemma. He has a hermeneutical
01:14:05.820
dilemma, right? He doesn't know what to do with what verse. Is he going to spiritualize it,
01:14:08.840
metaphorize it, or is he not going to do that? He was asked by an apologist called
01:14:12.340
Celsus. He said, what do you say of the crucifixion? And he responds to an effect to say that not
01:14:18.440
everything was true, what happened in the crucifixion. Point is that when you open the can of worms
01:14:23.780
of hermeneutical spiritualization or exegetical or, you know, metaphorization, yeah? When you
01:14:30.980
open that can of worms, what is left of Christianity is basically mythological. Now, then I will say,
01:14:37.180
what makes this myth better than any other myth? Why are we investigating the myth of
01:14:41.740
Christianity and not, for example, the myth of Hercules and Zeus? Why is the figure of Father
01:14:47.320
and Son and the Holy Spirit more important to me than the Mithraic, what do you call it, Trinity?
01:14:52.720
Yeah, well, that's a postmodern question. And you could take that even farther and say, well,
01:14:57.320
why this story rather than that story at any level of story? And that is a central question.
01:15:02.860
How would you answer? Because why did you, for example, you've done a biblical lecture, right?
01:15:06.200
So why have you done a biblical lecture, not a lecture on Zeus and this and all these other
01:15:09.560
Well, I have done lectures on other religious structures, particularly on ancient Egyptian
01:15:15.680
cosmology and on Mesopotamian cosmology. And I'm going to do a lecture on the Tao Te Ching.
01:15:21.600
Sorry, do you consider the biblical narrative as having any level of superiority over the other
01:15:27.860
Well, okay, okay. So let me try to address this psychology.
01:15:35.640
So I've been trying to understand. So I'll tell you one thing that clinical psychologists
01:15:41.860
have learned over the last hundred years, despite their doctrinal differences. So there's many schools
01:15:48.580
of clinical psychology ranging from behaviorism, which is very practical and strategic and has to do
01:15:55.040
with micro changes in action to psychoanalytic theory, say on the Jungian side, which is more
01:16:00.980
interested in dreams and large scale transformations of the imagination spreads, spans a huge range of
01:16:07.400
philosophies and practical approaches. But there is one commonality and it's emerged, I would say
01:16:15.980
empirically. The behaviorists first discovered, the behaviorists discovered that if someone was afraid of
01:16:21.800
something and avoiding it and the combination of those two things are important, because there's lots
01:16:27.340
of things you should be afraid of that you should avoid, like playing in traffic, because you'll just
01:16:32.260
die if you go run out in the street. But imagine that you're moving towards a necessary goal and you're
01:16:39.320
pretty committed to it and something comes up that you're afraid of and it stops you. And now you start
01:16:43.820
to avoid, okay, and then maybe that gives you an anxiety disorder, it makes you depressed.
01:16:49.340
Then the question is, what are you avoiding and why and what should you do about it? And what the
01:16:54.340
behaviorists started to do was to expose people to small doses of what they were afraid of and get
01:17:00.760
them to relax. And the idea was, well, if you could learn to relax in the face of what you were afraid
01:17:06.360
of, then the fear would go away. And maybe you had learned in some way to associate that with anxiety
01:17:12.400
earlier. Now, it turned out that that worked, but it also turned out that it worked even if you didn't
01:17:18.460
relax. And so there wasn't a learning to be calm. And then the psychoanalysts said, now that's not
01:17:25.240
going to work, behaviorists, because you'll expose someone to this little fear. And because the true
01:17:31.140
fear is much deeper, the fear will just reemerge somewhere else. They called that symptom substitution.
01:17:36.920
And that didn't happen either, because what happened, weirdly enough, was that if you got someone to
01:17:41.900
confront something they were afraid of voluntarily, then they got less afraid, that was the first
01:17:49.200
theory, less afraid of a whole bunch of things. So a little courage generated more. And that's a more
01:17:54.060
accurate way of thinking about it. Turns out people didn't get less afraid. They got braver. And so their
01:18:01.020
personality started to expand. And so what you see often, one category of people who often develop
01:18:07.160
anxiety disorders are dependent women. And so those are women who've gone from sort of superordinate
01:18:13.900
man to superordinate man who've never established a sufficient individual identity. And maybe that
01:18:19.300
comes back to haunt them later in life. And they develop an anxiety disorder. And maybe they're afraid
01:18:24.120
to get into an elevator. So you can teach them to confront the elevator and to get in it and to take it. And
01:18:30.940
then they'll go home and have a fight with their husband. And it's because they're braver. And often the
01:18:36.160
husband and the rest of the family will resist this woman's attempt to become more courageous because
01:18:41.260
they know what's going to happen if it's successful. But what that is what you see is you see generalization
01:18:46.600
of bravery. And every psychological school knows this. Okay, so now you asked me a theological question,
01:18:53.700
so I'm going to address that. So I've been trying to understand from a psychological perspective,
01:18:58.740
for example, why people have been gazing on the figure of the crucifix for 2,000 years. Now, not
01:19:06.000
everyone. And doctrinal differences apart, it's still many people for 2,000 years. And that begs a
01:19:13.680
question. Obviously, there's something about that image that's gripping. Okay, so now you might think,
01:19:20.260
why? Well, why do people go to horror movies? Because that's pretty strange. Why in the world would you go
01:19:25.640
be disgusted and terrified? Because that's sort of the essence of horror. And the answer is,
01:19:30.980
because there are terrifying and disgusting things about life. And maybe you should go confront them
01:19:36.160
now and then voluntarily to get a little taste so you can build a little courage and a little faith.
01:19:42.740
And so at minimum, one of the things that the crucifixion story, the passion story represents
01:19:50.420
is something like the sum of all possible tragedy. And so Jung pointed out that the passion narrative
01:20:00.680
was an archetypal tragedy. And this is what he meant by that. Imagine that you took a bunch of stories
01:20:06.420
that were tragic. And so you could identify them all as tragic stories. And a tragic story is something
01:20:11.840
like something terrible happens to someone who doesn't deserve it. That's a tragedy. So then imagine
01:20:16.840
you have 10 stories about maybe someone got betrayed by his best friend and someone fall prey to a
01:20:23.240
tyranny and someone died young and someone innocent was punished by a court. And you'd think, oh,
01:20:29.220
that's tragic. And then you took all those tragedies and you took the core of the tragedy and you made
01:20:34.440
it into one story. And that's in some sense what the passion story is. It's the sum of all possible
01:20:42.300
tragedies insofar as that can be construed by the revelatory imagination. And then you might say,
01:20:49.020
well, why gaze upon that? Well, the reason for that, there's a story in Exodus. It's in Numbers,
01:20:56.520
actually, where the Israelites are lost in the desert, like we all are. And people are losing faith
01:21:03.260
because they're in the desert and not voluntarily in some true sense. And so they're losing faith.
01:21:12.240
They're getting all fractious. They're fighting. They're starting to worship false idols. They're
01:21:16.320
falling apart. And God gets irritated at that. And so he sends a bunch of poisonous snakes in to bite
01:21:23.180
them. And you think, well, why would God do that? It's like, well, have you been alive? You know
01:21:28.100
perfectly well that if you're confused and lost and then you get bitter and disunited, that all you do
01:21:33.620
is make things worse and that more snakes come up to bite you. It's like, that's life. And so the
01:21:39.880
Israelites come to Moses and they say, you seem to be in quite nicely with God. Do you want to ask him
01:21:47.400
to call off the snakes? Like, we're sorry. Get him to call off the snakes. And so Moses has a chat with
01:21:53.440
God, let's say. And God says, he doesn't call off the snakes. And so that's the thing about God is
01:22:00.120
very often he doesn't call off the snakes, you know. And he says instead to Moses that you have
01:22:06.860
to make a staff. You have to cast a staff out of bronze. And on the staff, you have to place a
01:22:12.320
serpent. And then all the Israelites have to go and look at the serpent. And if they look at the
01:22:17.400
serpent, then they'll no longer be poisoned by the snakes. And then there's a section in the
01:22:23.060
Gospels where Christ says something approximating that unless his figure be lifted up like the
01:22:29.100
serpent in the desert, no one can be redeemed unless his figure is lifted up like the serpent
01:22:33.160
in the desert. Which is a very strange thing to have happen, right? Because it's a reference to this
01:22:37.980
very strange story that's ancient in a very strange context many thousands of years later.
01:22:46.340
But can imagine this. It's like, it's a bad thing to be confronted with snakes. And there's a real
01:22:52.620
reason that the symbol for medical transformation is a stake on a staff, right? And not just
01:22:58.720
associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's a much older idea than that. And so while
01:23:04.960
there's snakes, and that's bad, and you should look at them. But then there's something like the
01:23:11.000
sum total of all possible snakes. And that would be all the terrible things that could happen to you in
01:23:16.720
life. And then you could think, well, maybe you need a story that encompasses that territory of
01:23:24.840
terrible things that you can then look on. And that's at least in part what the passion story
01:23:33.020
represents. Now you can debate about whether or not it's a full account of the comprehensive tragedy
01:23:39.600
of life. But like I said, I'm thinking about it psychologically. Now there's more to it because
01:23:45.380
around that story, there's also a cloud of mythology, of associated imagery. And one of those
01:23:54.940
developed dreams is something like the harrowing of hell. So not only does Christ die terribly despite
01:24:03.980
not only being innocent, but being good and being betrayed and being subject to tyranny and having to
01:24:11.320
die before the eyes of his mother, all of that. But that's not enough. That hell itself has to be
01:24:21.400
confronted. I would say, well, is that true of your life? It's like, well, terrible things are going to
01:24:27.820
happen to you and you better be prepared. And then you might think, well, that's too much.
01:24:33.060
And if it's not too much, it's at least enough. And I would say, yeah, that'd be good to believe.
01:24:39.660
But I don't think it's true because you're actually going to have to do something like
01:24:43.500
confront the reality, at least of historical atrocity and human hell, because that's part
01:24:50.380
of your character too. And in order to fully reveal what you could be, then you have to contend
01:24:56.880
with all of that and you have to do it voluntarily. And so part of the reason I'm interested in that
01:25:02.820
the Christian story, let's say, is because that part of the story is where the rubber hits the
01:25:10.920
road in some sense. It's like, well, that's your responsibility is to confront the catastrophe and
01:25:17.180
hellish aspect of life forthrightly. And then the question is, is that transformative? And one answer is,
01:25:24.880
what did Nietzsche say? You know, you can tell the character of a man's spirit by determining how much
01:25:29.980
truth he can tolerate. It's a very interesting way of thinking about it. This is a crushing weight,
01:25:34.940
this notion, but life is going to throw its catastrophes at you, sometimes even if you're
01:25:42.420
innocent. And if you're not prepared, you know, in faith, well, you're going to fold and then it's
01:25:50.980
going to be much worse. And how much do you have to face? And the answer might be every bit of it.
01:25:56.480
Do you know, on this point, thank you for that. I think that you've really expressed that in a very
01:26:00.920
powerful way. And the last comment that you made really was, reminded me of a prophetic saying of
01:26:28.700
And this is not afforded to anybody except for the true believer.
01:26:42.140
And if negative things happen to him, he is patient and he's thankful.
01:26:46.480
Right, that's a hard thing to pull off, that last one.
01:26:48.960
The powerful thing is, and this is what Nietzsche was a great advocate for, ironically, he's a father of postmodernism in a sense,
01:26:55.440
but he was talking about human suffering as a positive thing for the resilience, or building of resilience in a human being.
01:27:05.120
Yeah, well, you know, so here's another thing that psychologists have learned.
01:27:09.760
So imagine that you take a group of people and you subject them to a difficult and onerous and stressful task.
01:27:17.320
But you've allowed, you've set up the experiment so one group has that inflicted on them, let's say,
01:27:23.380
and the other group decides to do it voluntarily.
01:27:25.600
And then you measure as accurately as you can the pattern of physical and psychological response to those two conditions.
01:27:33.080
What you find is that independent of the weight of the load, the attitude transforms the response.
01:27:42.380
And so if you confront something difficult in the spirit of voluntary engagement,
01:27:51.720
Yeah, that's exactly what I remember Viktor Frankl saying.
01:27:54.120
He was saying that those in the concentration camp who are most likely to survive are, in fact, those who made meaning out of...
01:28:01.240
Well, Solzhenitsyn said something, I think, that was even more profound on that front.
01:28:05.680
He said, he left ambiguous the issue of whether or not you were more likely to survive if you were a believer, let's say.
01:28:15.640
Although he was struck, as an atheist, by the composure that true religious believers had in the gulag.
01:28:22.580
But what he did say, more importantly, I would say even, was that if you were a genuine believer, your soul was more likely to survive.
01:28:31.540
And what he meant by that was many people in the gulag camps became corrupted.
01:28:36.440
And you can think about them as a microcosm of the world.
01:28:40.360
And one of the temptations was to become a trustee and participate in the system of oppression.
01:28:48.200
And the camps in Russia could not possibly have sustained themselves if the prisoners weren't running them.
01:28:54.700
And that's something to think about with regards to totalitarianism.
01:28:57.660
And Solzhenitsyn did note, and it was transformative to him, that there were people of genuine religious faith who were immobile in their commitment to ethical action, even in the confines of the camp.
01:29:11.560
Even when faced with something like recant or die.
01:29:20.120
And one of the things that transformed Solzhenitsyn, and then the world, because his book transformed the world in large part, was his observation that this genuine striving to something like clarity of speech and a higher unity could withstand even the catastrophes of the gulag camps.
01:29:39.380
I want to ask you a question just before we end.
01:29:41.660
I'm going to pull out the site here just to indicate we need to wrap up.
01:29:44.680
I just want to ask one last question, because I'm interested in both of you, in a sense, yeah?
01:29:48.900
I said that, you know, from a Muslim perspective, the question that we're asked to ask is, bring the evidence, yeah?
01:29:55.000
If I were to bring reasonable evidence, which would satisfy some kind of probabilistic reasoning, that the Prophet Muhammad, we believe is the final Prophet, right?
01:30:09.120
I wouldn't dispute a priori the idea that Muhammad was a true Prophet.
01:30:22.780
So this is the way I'm going to look at this psychologically again.
01:30:26.460
You know, people are granted revelations, and it's obviously the case, let's speak empirically, that the revelation of Muhammad united a fractious society.
01:30:40.700
Now, how to conceptualize, but it's not a universally uniting revelation, at least not yet, or not now, because we're not all united.
01:30:51.960
Well, maybe we didn't understand the revelation problem.
01:30:55.860
Is the presupposition what you're saying, that unity is the ultimate objective?
01:31:00.080
Well, not exactly, you know, because then you have the problem of uniformity that you pointed out, right?
01:31:15.080
For example, if there is an injustice that is so great, that disunity is more appropriate,
01:31:22.340
then I can imagine situations where disunity is probably better than unity.
01:31:28.240
That would be a false unity in some sense, right?
01:31:30.160
Well, that's why you wanted to address the elephant under the carpet right away.
01:31:36.420
And we can't incorporate things we can't yet incorporate.
01:31:40.300
The reason I'm bringing this to your attention is because I feel like it's my duty as a Muslim,
01:31:44.660
To tell you that as Muslims, we believe that the previous dispensations, as they were like
01:31:51.280
Christianity and Judaism, they are part of our faith in a sense.
01:31:55.040
Not in the sense of believing the doctrines and all of that kind of thing.
01:31:57.720
Like we obviously don't believe in the original sin or the resurrection, the crucifixion, all
01:32:05.240
But in the sense that we do believe in Jesus Christ.
01:32:08.480
We believe in all of the Old Testament prophets, most of them, if not all of them.
01:32:11.780
And, you know, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and so on.
01:32:14.580
And we believe that each prophet was sent with two things.
01:32:17.180
The message, which is to believe and worship in one God, and some kind of evidence to indicate
01:32:23.660
So with, for example, Moses and Jesus, we know what their miracles are, splitting the
01:32:28.040
And we believe that actually happened historically, right?
01:32:31.480
We don't have this kind of materialistic viewpoint on the issue.
01:32:35.720
With Muhammad, we believe that because he was sent to all of humanity.
01:32:41.780
He had to have an evidence base that would satisfy not just the eyes.
01:32:47.140
In other words, it wouldn't be just something that could be witnessed.
01:32:49.500
It would be something that can be interrogated and scrutinized for all times and places.
01:32:58.380
So the central message of the Quran is Tawheed, or the idea of worshiping one God and believing
01:33:07.420
But there are some, there is an attempt in the Quran to challenge, like for example, there's
01:33:13.080
something called the falsification test, or the inimitability test.
01:33:16.920
The Quran says, for example, that try and find a contradiction within the Quran, had it
01:33:22.000
been from other than God, we have found in it many contradictions.
01:33:27.280
This inimitability challenge is to produce something as sophisticated as it in terms of
01:33:32.860
the linguistic composition as well as the structural component.
01:33:35.960
This is very interesting because now even Western academics like Angelica and Eurus and others
01:33:41.240
have said that this challenge has not been met.
01:33:48.920
Then you have a range of prophecies, for example.
01:33:51.220
Like if you look at Deuteronomy chapter 18, verse 21, it's mentioned in the Bible that
01:33:55.180
one of the hallmarks of a true prophet is that, or a false prophet, is that when they
01:34:02.160
Well, the Quran makes very specific, very specific prophecies about the future.
01:34:07.480
For example, in chapter 30, verse 2 to 4, it says,
01:34:16.400
At that time, there was the Sassanid Empire and the Roman Empire, and they were in war with
01:34:21.340
And that from three to nine years, they would defeat the enemy.
01:34:27.440
It gave very specific, and this was a very risky type of prediction.
01:34:32.160
Because if you got it wrong, then it would endanger and undermine the entire prophethood
01:34:37.120
And in fact, you'll find historical things, which are not even in the Quran.
01:34:42.500
No, that the Persians, sorry, that the Romans had been defeated by the Persians in a battle.
01:34:48.240
And so it's mentioned, for example, in the Chronicles of Theophanies, which is a primary
01:34:52.240
source material outside of the Quran and Sunnah.
01:34:55.000
You can find it now, it's even translated into English.
01:34:56.820
He clearly mentions that eight years after this particular prediction took place, it did
01:35:03.480
So we have a range of predictions, even that relate to the current day.
01:35:09.760
they will be competing for the highest building.
01:35:14.520
That sexually transmitted diseases would be proliferated as a result of people having
01:35:21.440
And that this would be something that would be diseases that had never been there in the
01:35:26.140
The interest-based economy that we live in is mentioned by the Prophet Muhammad.
01:35:31.520
So I said, in the future, interest will be everywhere.
01:35:35.440
إِنْ لَمْ يَأْكُلْهُ أَصَابَتُهُ مِنْ غُبَارِهِ
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Whoever does not consume it, he will not be able to evade its dust.
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So for example, you've got a range of prophecies where Islam will spread country by country.
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What was projected, and they're saying east and west.
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he said that the similitude of the Muslims going eastward and westward
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and conquering the amount of countries that they conquered in that early period,
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which you can read in the book that I've given you,
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On the point of prophecies, even people like Edward Gibbons,
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they agree that the prophecies of the Quran had been met.
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Well, look, I would say to some degree, it's not up to me.
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No, no, but my question was, just to remind you,
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that would satisfy a certain level of probabilistic...
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No, because that isn't how I evaluate the situation.
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Well, I'm Muslim enough to have been invited to your mosque.
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I don't think in some sense, it's a very complicated problem.
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and they said to me on the street that they call me rabbi,
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And I've had lots of correspondence with people.
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And the same thing has happened with the Orthodox Christians,
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And so I don't know exactly what to make of that.
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Well, are you a shining example of the Muslim faith?