In this episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Dr. Peterson begins a series of lectures on the psychological significance of the Bible and its influence on our understanding of the world and the world at large. In this episode, he explains why he thinks it's important to talk about the Bible, and why he believes it's so important that we talk about it, even if we don't know what it means. This episode is the first in a 12-part series entitled, Introduction to the Idea of God: The Psychological Meaning of The Bible and the Bible in the Modern World, which will be performed every Tuesday throughout the remainder of the summer at the Isabel Bader Theatre in Toronto. You can find tickets for future events in this biblical series in the description of this episode or at J.B. Peterson's website, which can be found at JBPeterson.net/TheIdea of God. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Petersen's PODCAST by making a monthly donation to his Go Fund Me campaign. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients who are struggling. with a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, Dr Peterson offers a roadmap towards healing. . Dr. Dr. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone, and there's hope, and a path to feeling better. -Dr. Peterson and a way to find your way to feel better. Please know that you're not alone. Thank you for listening to this podcast, and let me know what you deserve to be a part of the movement you deserve a brighter future that can help you feel better, and that you deserve it! - Dr. B. , Dr. P. Peterson, too! - Thank you, - Elyssa Peterson - Caitlyn McLeod, Caitlyn, , & Dr. J. B., of the Daily Wire PLUS - JB Peterson , and Dr. John Rocha
00:20:30.300Now, Jung was a student of Nietzsche's, you see, and he was also, I would say, a very astute
00:20:40.180critic of Nietzsche, he was educated by Freud, and Freud, I suppose, in some sense, started
00:20:48.000to collate the information that we had pertaining to the notion that people lived inside a dream,
00:20:54.060you know, it was Freud who really popularized the idea of the unconscious mind, and we take
00:20:59.420this for granted to such a degree today that we don't understand how revolutionary the
00:21:04.020idea was, like with what's happened with Freud is that we've taken all the marrow out
00:21:08.200of his bones, so to speak, and left the husk behind, and, you know, now when we think about
00:21:13.360Freud, we just think about the husk, because that's everything that's been discarded, but
00:21:17.300so much of what he discovered is part of our popular conception now, including the idea
00:21:21.540that your perceptions and your actions and your thoughts are all, what would you say,
00:21:27.400informed and shaped by unconscious motivations that are not part of your voluntary control,
00:21:33.540and that's a very, very strange thing.
00:21:35.540It's one of the most unsettling things about the psychoanalytic theories, because the psychoanalytic
00:21:40.780theories are something like, you're a loose collection of living sub-personalities, each with its own set of motivations,
00:21:48.040and perceptions, and emotions, and rationales, all of that. And you have limited control over that,
00:21:53.900so you're like a plurality of internal personalities that's loosely linked into a unity. You know that, because
00:22:01.900you can't control yourself very well, which is one of Jung's objections to Nietzsche's idea that we could create our own values.
00:22:08.900See, Jung didn't believe that, especially not after interacting with Freud, because he saw that human beings were affected by
00:22:15.760things that were deeply, deeply affected by things that were beyond their conscious control. And no one really knows how to conceptualize those things.
00:22:22.760You know, the cognitive psychologists think about them, in some sense, as computational machines. And the ancient people, I think, thought of them as gods,
00:22:30.640although it's more complex than that. Like, rage would be a god. Mars, the god of rage, that's the thing that possesses you when you're angry.
00:22:38.500You know, it has a viewpoint, and it says what it wants to say, and that might have very little to do with what you want to say when you're being sensible.
00:22:46.500And it doesn't just inhabit you, it inhabits everyone, and it lives forever, and it even inhabits animals.
00:22:52.500So it's this transcendent psychological entity that inhabits the body politic, like a thought inhabits the brain.
00:23:02.360That's one way of thinking about it. It's a very strange way of thinking, but it certainly has its merits.
00:23:08.360And so, and those things, well, in some sense, those are deities, although it's not that simple.
00:23:13.360And so Jung, Jung was, got very interested in dreams, and started to understand the relationship between dreams and myths,
00:23:21.600because he would see, in his clients' dreams, echoes of stories that he knew, because it was deeply read in mythology.
00:23:28.360And then he started to believe that the dream was the birthplace of the myth, and that there was a continual interaction between the two processes,
00:23:36.660the dream and the story, and storytelling.
00:23:38.840And, well, you know, you tend to tell your dreams as stories when you remember them, and some people remember dreams all the time.
00:23:45.340Like, two or three a night, I've had clients like that, and they often have archetypal dreams that have very clear mythological structures.
00:23:52.080I think that's more the case with people who are creative, by the way, especially if they're a bit unstable at the time.
00:23:57.940Because the dream tends to occupy the space of uncertainty, and to concentrate on fleshing out the unknown reality before you get a real grip on it.
00:24:07.940And so, it's like the dream is the birthplace of thinking.
00:24:10.940That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:24:12.440And so, because it's the birthplace of thinking, it's not that clear.
00:24:15.440It's doing its best to formulate something.
00:24:18.440That was Jung's notion, as opposed to Freud, who believed that there were sensors, internal sensors, that were hiding the dream's true message.
00:28:57.440So, but often she'd have a dream, you know.
00:28:59.440And then the next morning she'd discuss it with me and then we could unravel what was at the bottom of our argument.
00:29:04.440And that was unbelievably useful, even though it was extraordinarily aggravating.
00:29:08.440So, you know, I was convinced by Jung, it looked to me like his ideas about the relationship between dreams and mythology and drama and literature.
00:29:17.440It made sense to me and the relationship between that and art.
00:29:21.440I know this native carver, he's a Kwakwakawak guy, he's carved a bunch of wooden sculptures, totem poles and masks that I have in my house.
00:29:31.440And he's a very interesting person, not literate, not particularly literate, and really still steeped in this ancient 13,000-year-old tradition.
00:29:41.440And the fact that he isn't literate has sort of left him with the mind of someone who's pre-literate.
00:29:47.440And pre-literate people aren't stupid, they're just not literate, so their brains are organized differently in many ways.
00:29:53.440And I've asked him about his intuition for his carvings, and he's told me that he dreams, like, you've seen the Haida masks, you know what they look like.
00:30:03.440Well, his people are closely related to the Haida, so it's the same kind of style.
00:30:09.440And he said, he dreams in those animals, and can remember his dreams.
00:30:14.440And he also talks to his grandparents who taught him how to carve in his dreams.
00:30:19.440Quite often, if he runs into a problem with carving, his grandparents will come and he'll talk to them.
00:30:23.440But he sees the creatures that he's going to carve living in an animated sense in his imagination.
00:32:44.440And that's one of the things that's so damn frightening about the psychoanalysts.
00:32:47.440Because, and you get this both from Freud and Jung, you really start to understand that there are things inside you that are happening that control you instead of the other way around.
00:32:58.440You know, there's a bit of reciprocal control, but there's manifestations of spirits, so to speak, inside you that determine the manner in which you walk through life.
00:33:12.440You know, there are people who have claimed that dreams are merely the consequence of random neuronal firing, which is a theory I think is absolutely absurd because there's nothing random about dreams.
00:33:23.440You know, they're very, very structured and very, very complex.
00:33:27.440And they're not like snow on a television screen or static on a radio.
00:34:00.440You know, or maybe you dream up a nightmare and try to make that into a reality because people do that too if they're hell-bent on revenge, for example, and full of hatred and resentment.
00:34:08.440I mean, that manifests itself in terrible fantasies.
00:34:12.440You know, those are dreams and then people go act them out.
00:41:29.440And at the end of that process, that took God only knows how long.
00:41:33.440Like, I think some of these stories, they've traced fairy tales back 10,000 years.
00:41:39.440Some fairy tales in relatively unchanged form.
00:41:42.440And it certainly seems to me that the archeological evidence, for example, suggests that the really old stories that the Bible begins with are at least that old and likely embedded in a prehistory that's far older than that.
00:41:56.440And you might think, well, how can you be so sure?
00:41:59.440And the answer to that in part is that cultures that don't change, like the ancient cultures, right?
00:42:15.440And so we know, again, in the archeological record, there are records of rituals that have remained relatively unbroken for up to 20,000 years.
00:42:23.440It was discovered in caves in Japan that were set up for a particular kind of bear worship that was also characteristic of Western Europe.
00:42:31.440So these things can last for very long periods of time.
00:42:35.440We're watching each other act in the world.
00:42:39.440And then the question is, well, how long have we been watching each other?
00:42:43.440And the answer to that in some sense is, well, as long as there's been creatures with nervous systems.
00:42:49.440And that's a long time, you know, that's some hundreds of millions of years, perhaps longer than that.
00:42:54.440We've been watching each other, trying to figure out what we're up to across that entire span of time.
00:42:59.440And some of that knowledge is built right into our bodies, which is why we can dance with each other, for example, right?
00:43:04.440Because understanding isn't just something that you have as an abstraction.
00:43:10.440It's something that you act out, you know?
00:43:12.440That's what children are doing when they're learning to rough and tumble plays.
00:43:15.440They're learning to integrate their body with the body of someone else in a harmonious way, learning to cooperate and compete.
00:43:22.440And that's all instantiated right into their body.
00:44:51.440And then you get the chance to talk about what that dream is.
00:44:55.440And then you have it, you have something like articulated knowledge at that point.
00:45:00.440And so the Bible, I would say, is, is, it's sort of, it exists in that space that's half into the dream and half into articulated knowledge.
00:45:41.440You know, the people who are adamant anti-religious thinkers seem to believe that if we abandoned our immersement in the underlying dream, that we'd all instantly become rationalists like Descartes or Bacon.
00:50:17.440Well, I think if you want the initial answer of what the archaic Israelites meant by God, that's something like what they meant.
00:50:27.440Now, it's not a good enough explanation, but, look, imagine that you're a chimpanzee and you have a powerful, dominant figure at the pinnacle of your society.
00:52:00.440It manifests itself in personified form.
00:52:02.440But that's okay, because what we're trying to get at is, in some sense, the essence of what it means to be a properly functioning, properly social, and properly competent individual.
00:52:15.440We're trying to figure out what that means.
00:52:19.440You need an ideal that's abstracted, that you could act out, that would enable you to understand what that means.
00:52:26.440And that's what we've been driving at.
00:52:28.440So that's the first hypothesis, in some sense.
00:52:31.440I'm going to go over some of the attributes of this abstracted ideal that we've formalized as God.
00:52:37.440But that's the first sort of hypothesis, is that a philosophical or moral ideal manifests itself first as a concrete pattern of behavior that's characteristic of a single individual.
00:53:21.440Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:53:30.440And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:53:33.440With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:53:41.440Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:54:42.440Starting a business can be tough, but thanks to Shopify, running your online storefront is easier than ever.
00:54:47.440Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business.
00:54:52.440From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is here to help you grow.
00:54:59.440Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise, and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products, and track conversions.
00:55:07.440With Shopify, customize your online store to your style with flexible templates and powerful tools,
00:55:12.440alongside an endless list of integrations and third-party apps like on-demand printing, accounting, and chatbots.
00:55:18.440Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout, up to 36% better compared to other leading e-commerce platforms.
00:55:26.440No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level.
00:55:32.440Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash jbp, all lowercase.
00:55:39.440Go to shopify.com slash jbp now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in.
00:55:47.440One of the debates, we might say, between early Christianity and the late Roman Empire was whether or not an emperor could be God, literally, right?
00:56:10.440And you can see why that might happen, because that's someone at the pinnacle of a very steep hierarchy who has a tremendous amount of power and influence.
00:56:18.440But the Christian response to that was, never confuse the specific sovereign with the principle of sovereignty itself.
00:56:30.440You see how difficult it is to come up with an idea like that, so that even the person who has the power is actually subordinate to something else.
00:56:37.440Subordinate to, let's call it a divine principle, for lack of a better word.
00:56:42.440So that even the king himself is subordinate to the principle.
00:56:46.440And we still believe that, because we believe that our president, our prime minister, is subordinate to the damn law.
00:56:54.440There's a principle inside that, that even the leader is subordinate to.
00:56:58.440And without that, you could argue you can't even have a civilized society, because your leader immediately turns into something that's transcendent and all-powerful.
00:57:07.440And I mean, that's certainly what happened in the Soviet Union, and what happened in Maoist China, and what happened in Nazi Germany.
00:57:13.440Because there was nothing for the powerful to subordinate themselves to.
00:57:17.440You're supposed to be subordinate to God.
01:00:17.440He's got eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words.
01:00:21.440And then he also goes out, and when he fights, he fights this deity called Tiamat.
01:00:26.440And we need to know that, because the word Tiamat is associated with the word Tehom, T-E-H-O-M.
01:00:33.440And Tehom is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time in Genesis.
01:00:38.440So it's linked very tightly to this story.
01:00:41.440And Marduk, with his eyes and his capacity to speak magic words, goes out to confront Tiamat, who's like a watery sea dragon, something like that.
01:04:23.440Things that upset us rely on that system.
01:04:27.440And then the story, the Marduk story, for example, is the idea that if there are things that upset you, chaotic, terrible, serpentine, monstrous, underworld things that threaten you, the best thing to do is to open your eyes and get your speech organized and go out and confront the thing and make the world out of it.
01:04:46.440When I read that story and started to understand, it just blew me away that it's such a profound idea.
01:04:52.440And we know it's true, too, because we know in psychotherapy, for example, that you're much better off to confront your fears head on than you are to wait and let them find you.
01:05:02.440And so partly what you do if you're a psychotherapist is you help people break their fears into little pieces, the things that upset them, and then to encounter them one by one and master them.
01:05:12.440And so you're teaching this process of eternal mastery over the strange and chaotic world.
01:05:18.440And all of that makes up some of the background.
01:05:21.440We haven't even got to the first sentence of the biblical stories yet.
01:05:31.440But all of that makes up the background.
01:05:33.440So you have to think that we've extracted this story, this strange collection of stories with all its errors and its repetitions and its peculiarities out of the entire history that we've been able to collect ideas.
01:05:47.440And it's the best we've been able to do.
01:05:50.440And I know there are other religious traditions.
01:05:53.440I'm not concerned about that at the moment because we can use this as an example.
01:05:58.440But it's the best we've been able to do.
01:06:00.440And what I'm hoping is that we can return to the stories in some sense with an open mind and see if there's something there that we actually need.
01:06:07.440And I hope that that will be the case.
01:06:11.440And as I said, I'll approach it as rationally as I possibly can.
01:06:14.440So, well, this is the idea to begin with, you know.
01:17:23.440But here's the issue, as far as I can tell.
01:17:27.440So when the postmodernists extended that critique to the world, they said, look, while a text is complicated enough, you can't extract out a canonical interpretation.
01:18:07.440It's very depressing, because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them, your body defaults into emergency preparation mode.
01:18:15.440And your heart rate goes up, and your immune system stops working, and, like, you burn yourself out.
01:18:20.440You age rapidly, because you're surrounded by nothing you can control.
01:18:30.440And even more than that, it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim.
01:18:39.440And we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim.
01:18:43.440It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy.
01:18:48.440As you all know, if you've ever attained anything, because as soon as you attain it, then the whole little game ends.
01:18:54.440Then you have to come up with another game.
01:19:17.440So what happens is that human beings are weird creatures, because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment.
01:19:27.440And what that means is you have to have an aim.
01:19:29.440And that means you have to have an interpretation.
01:19:31.440And it also means that the nobler the aim, that's one way of thinking about it, the better your life.
01:19:37.440And that's a really interesting thing to know.
01:19:39.440Because, you know, you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person.
01:23:36.440That's so ridiculously comical, you know.
01:23:39.440But, okay, but you see, we have to grapple with that.
01:23:42.440And so the you that's out there in the future is sort of like another person.
01:23:46.440And so figuring out how to conduct yourself properly in relationship to your future self isn't much different than figuring out how to conduct yourself in relationship to other people.
01:23:55.440But then we could expand the constraints.
01:23:58.440Not only does the interpretation that you extract have to protect you from suffering and give you an aim,
01:24:04.440but it has to do it in a way that's iterable, so it works across time, and then it has to work in the presence of other people,
01:24:11.440so that you can cooperate with them and compete with them in a way that doesn't make you suffer more.
01:24:16.440And people are, they're, they're not that tolerant.
01:24:19.440You know, I mean, they have choices, they don't have to hang around with you, they can hang around with any one of these other primates.
01:24:25.440And so, if you don't act properly, at least within certain boundaries, it's like, you're just cast aside.
01:24:31.440And so people are broadcasting information at you all the time about how you need to interpret the world, so they can tolerate being around you.
01:24:39.440And you need that, because socially isolated, you're insane and then you're dead.
01:24:43.440No one can tolerate being alone for any length of time.
01:24:46.440We can't maintain our own sanity without continual feedback from other people, because it's too damn complicated.
01:24:52.440So, you're constrained by your own existence, and then you're constrained by the existence of other people.
01:24:58.440And then you're also constrained by the world, you know, if I read Hamlet, and what I extract out of that is the idea that I should jump off a bridge.
01:25:06.440It's like, it's, it puts my interpretation to an end rather, rather quickly.
01:25:11.440It doesn't seem to be optimally functional, let's say.
01:25:15.440And so, an interpretation has, is constrained by the reality of the world, it's constrained by the reality of other people,
01:25:22.440and it's constrained by your reality across time.
01:25:25.440And there's only a small number of interpretations that are going to work in that tightly defined space.
01:25:31.440And so, that's part of the reason that the postmodernists are wrong.
01:25:35.440It's also part of the reason, by the way, that AI people who've been trying to make intelligent machines have had to put them in a body.
01:25:41.440Is it turns out that you just can't make something intelligent, in some sense, without it being embodied.
01:25:46.440And it's partly for the reasons that I just described, is, you need constraints on the system, before, you need constraints on the system,
01:25:55.440so that the system doesn't drown in an infinite sea of interpretation.
01:28:08.440And that's the question of the ultimate ideal, in some sense.
01:28:11.440Even if you have trivial, little, you know, fragmentary ideals.
01:28:15.440There's something trying to emerge out of that that's more coherent and more integrated and more applicable and more practical.
01:28:24.440And that's the other thing, is that, you know, you think about literature and you think about art and you think those aren't very tightly tied to the earth.
01:28:33.440They're imperian and airy and spiritual and they don't seem practical.
01:28:40.440And part of the reason that I want to assess these books from a literary and aesthetic and evolutionary perspective is to extract out something of value.
01:28:49.440Something of real value that's practical.
01:28:52.440You know, something, because one of the rules that I have when I'm lecturing is that I don't want to tell anybody anything that they can't use.
01:29:00.440Because I think of knowledge as a tool.
01:29:02.440It's something to implement in the world.
01:29:05.440We're tool-using creatures and our knowledge is tools.
01:29:08.440And we need tools to work in the world.
01:29:10.440We need tools to regulate our emotions and to make things better and to put an end to suffering to the degree that we can.
01:30:17.440Because that's a form of lie, as far as I can tell.
01:30:19.440And then, well, then you have to scrap the whole thing.
01:30:21.440Because in principle, the whole thing's about truth.
01:30:23.440And if you have to start your pursuit of truth by swallowing a bunch of lies, then how in the world are you going to get anywhere with that?
01:30:29.440And so, I don't want any uncertainty at the bottom of this.
01:30:34.440Or, I don't want any more than I have to leave in it.
01:30:38.440Because I can't get any farther than that.
01:30:40.440And so, it's going to make sense, rationally.
01:30:43.440I don't want it to be pushing up against what we know to be scientifically untrue.
01:34:56.440It's obviously the sun comes up and goes down and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again.
01:35:02.440There's nothing more self-evident than that.
01:35:04.440Well, that's that strange intermingling of subjective fantasy, let's say, right at the level of perception and actual observable phenomena.
01:35:13.440And a lot of the cosmology that's associated with the biblical stories is exactly like that.
01:35:18.440It's half psychology and half reality.
01:35:23.440Although the psychological is real as well.
01:35:26.440And to know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing.
01:35:34.440Because, you know, the poor fundamentalists, they're trying to cling to their moral structure.
01:36:56.440And so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious individuals.
01:37:07.440Like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals.
01:37:10.440Then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding.
01:37:15.440And eliminates the contradiction that's been painful for people between the objective world and, let's say, the claims of religious stories.
01:39:11.440And then I want to pull back from that and say, okay, well, we'll leave that as a fact and a mystery.
01:39:15.440But we'll look at this, we're going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal.
01:39:25.440And to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation.
01:39:45.440There's many different books, even, and they're interwoven together, especially in the first five books, by people who, I suspect, took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent.
01:40:05.440And so, they took a little of this, and they took a little of that, and they took a little of this, and they tried not to lose anything because it seemed valuable, or it was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories.
01:40:16.440They weren't going to, you know, tolerate too much editing.
01:40:20.440But they also wanted it to make sense to some degree, so it wasn't completely logically contradictory and completely absurd.
01:40:29.440And so, many people wrote it, and many people edited it, and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time.
01:40:37.440And we have very few documents like that, and so just because we have a document like that is a sufficient reason to look at it as a remarkable phenomena and try to understand what it is that it's trying to communicate, let's say.
01:40:51.440And then I said, it's also the world's first hyperlinked text, which is that again, and very much worth thinking about for quite a long time.
01:41:00.440Alright, there's four sources in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible.
01:41:06.440Four stories that we know came together.
01:41:08.440One was called the Priestly, there's a source called the Priestly, and it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God.
01:41:15.440And I believe El is the root word for Ella as well.
01:41:19.440So, and that's usually translated as God or the gods, because Elohim is utilized as plural in the beginning books of the Bible.
01:41:29.440And it's newer than the Yahwist version.
01:41:32.440Now, the reason I'm telling you that is because Genesis 1, which is the first story, isn't as old as Genesis 2.
01:41:39.440Genesis 2 contains, the Yahwist version contains the story, for example, of Adam and Eve.
01:41:44.440And that's older than the very first book in the Bible.
01:41:47.440But they decided to put the newer version first.
01:41:50.440And, well, it isn't, and I think it's because it deals with more fundamental abstractions.
01:42:26.440This is the account of the heavens and the earth wind.
01:42:28.440And it contains the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel and Exodus and Numbers, along with the priestly version.
01:42:36.440It also contains the law in the form, just the form of the Ten Commandments, which is like a truncated form of the law.
01:50:35.440Because, you know, the feminists are always criticizing Christianity, for example, as being, what, inexorably patriarchal.
01:50:43.440Of course, they criticize everything like that, so it's hardly a stroke of bloody brilliance.
01:50:49.440But I think it's an absolute miracle that right at the beginning of the document, it says straightforwardly, like, with no hesitation whatsoever, that the divine spark, which we're associating with the word that brings forth being, is manifest in men and women equally.
01:51:17.440That's, read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
01:51:21.440That's the best, the best investigation of that tactic that's ever been produced.
01:51:29.440Because what happens in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is that the main character, whose name is Raskolnikov, decides that there's no intrinsic value to other people.
01:51:38.440And that, as a consequence, he can do whatever he wants.
01:51:41.440It's only cowardice that stops him from acting.
01:52:06.440And he finds out something after he kills her, which is that the post-killing Raskolnikov and the pre-killing Raskolnikov are not the same person, even a little bit.
01:52:16.440Because he's broken a rule, like he's broken a serious rule, and there's no going back.
01:52:21.440And crime and punishment is the best investigation I know of, of what happens if you take the notion that there's nothing divine about the individual seriously.
01:52:31.440Now, you know, most of the people I know who are deeply atheistic, and I understand why they're deeply atheistic, they haven't contended with people like Dostoevsky.
01:52:45.440Because I don't see logical flaws in crime and punishment.
01:52:48.440I think he got the psychology exactly right.
01:52:50.440And Dostoevsky's amazing for this, because in one of his books, The Devils, for example, he describes a political scenario that's not much different than the one we've seen.
01:53:34.440It's uncanny to read Dostoevsky's The Possessed, or The Devils, depending on the translation.
01:53:39.440And then to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.
01:53:43.440Because one is fiction and prophecy, and the second is, hey, look, it turned out exactly the way that Dostoevsky said it would, for exactly the same reasons.
01:53:53.440So, well, so the question is, do you contend seriously with the idea that, A, there's something cosmically constitutive about consciousness,
01:54:03.440and B, that that might well be considered divine, and C, that that is instantiated in every person.
01:54:10.440And then ask yourself, if you're not a criminal, if you don't act it out.
01:54:15.440And then ask yourself what that means.
01:56:15.440So here's what God as a Father is like.
01:56:18.440You can enter into a covenant with it, so you can make a bargain with it.
01:56:22.440Now, you think about that. Money is like that.
01:56:25.440Because money is a bargain you make with the future, right?
01:56:28.440And so we structured our world so that you can negotiate with the future.
01:56:33.440And I don't think that we would have got to the point where we could do that without having this idea to begin with.
01:56:39.440You can act as if the future is a reality.
01:56:42.440There's a spirit of tradition that enables you to act as if the future is something that can be bargained with.
01:56:47.440That's why you make sacrifices, right?
01:56:49.440And the sacrifices were acted out for a very long period of time, and now they're psychological.
01:56:54.440We know that you can sacrifice something valuable in the present, and expect that you're negotiating with something that represents the transcendent future.
01:57:03.440And that's an amazing human discovery.
01:57:06.440Like, no other creature can do that, to act as if the future is real.
01:57:10.440To note that you can bargain with reality itself, and that you can do it successfully.
01:57:32.440You see, the thing that's one of the things that's weird about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that God and nature are not the same thing at all.
01:57:39.440Whatever God is partially manifest in this Logos is something that stands outside of nature.
01:57:44.440And I think that's something like consciousness as abstracted from the natural world.
01:57:50.440So, it built Eden for mankind, and then banished us for disobedience.