My eldest son Henry has been listening to Jordan Peterson, a brilliant Canadian academic who has caused a furore on the internet by challenging the far left on gender issues.
He’s a highly erudite clinical psychologist who’s been dubbed by some the new Joseph Campbell. That’s a big call – but there’s no doubt this man is very very bright. And articulate.
Henry put me onto a podcast by Sam Harris – another brilliant mind – called Waking up with Sam Harris.
https://www.samharris.org/podcast
In this particular podcast Sam Harris interviews Jordan Peterson, wanting to discuss mythology, religion, spirituality, and other weighty matters.
However, these two brilliant minds can’t get past the definition of what is truth. And what unfolds over two hours – yes, two hours – is this fascinating interchange between these two intellectual heavyweights over the nature of truth.
In amongst this complex to-and-fro is an exchange on consciousness, and its basis in religion. Here is an interesting excerpt from that two hour discussion:
SH: I think there is a subjective dimension of reality that is undeniable – and consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can’t be an illusion. It’s the only thing that you can be absolutely sure exists at this moment.
JP: I think part of your fundamental ethical metaphysics and it’s a point on which we agree is that you are very concerned with pain, for lack of a better word, and one of the conclusions that I’ve reached – and let’s call consciousness a reality – I would say that the most undeniable form of consciousness is acute agony, because no-one doubts that, not if you watch them act, and that’s one of the criteria by which I judge whether someone believes something. If people act out something uncontrollably then I’m convinced that they believe it, regardless of what they think they believe. And I think it’s for that reason that so many religious systems start with the same metaphysic, which is that life is suffering, that’s the ultimate reality. And that’s associated with consciousness, certainly, but it’s more precise than that, because maybe you can doubt whether you’re happy, but it’s very difficult to doubt that you are in agony and have that actually work, and so people act as if that’s the most real thing..
I don’t know about you but when I heard that and I thought about religion, it struck me as true that most religions have as their basis the notion of suffering. Christianity generally – look at Christ on the Cross. And Catholicism has taken that notion of suffering and honed it into a belief system. So too Buddhism – of course.
I’m not an intellectual – haha, not by any stretch of the imagination – nor am I a scholar. But I can’t quite grasp this notion that life, reality, consciousness, is rooted in suffering. I don’t believe we were born to suffer.
I believe we were born to experience joy, and love, and fulfilment. And that as we awaken our consciousness, the pain and the suffering disappear. Because we step out of the illusion of life, of who we think we are – and we awaken to the possibility of who we really are… which is divine beings.
All of us.
Even Donald Trump.
Jordan Peterson – Professor of Psychology Toronto University
PGS - The Way 
I really attune to this perspective Bill – it is a goodness of fit for me. We just need to keep expanding our consciousness to evolve as joyful, loving compassionate divine beings. x
LikeLike
Missed this one somehow.
Longer comment later, but very quickly, no, the core of Christianity is NOT suffering – it’s Love.
The whole “Catholic guilt” thing is rubbish, taken either from some errors in 19th Century clericalism (remnants of which persist), bad post-WW2 catechesis, Protestant ideology mistaken for Christian generals, atheist anti-clerical & anti-religious propaganda, and more generally just the pervasive ignorance, including among many Christians, of what Christianity even teaches in the first place.
The Christian Spirituality is not a form of intellectual masochism.
LikeLike
Julian – you might say Catholic guilt is rubbish from an intellectual standpoint, but I personally know so many Catholics that are riddled with guilt. I would love to think that Christianity is built on a core foundation of Love – but that must be a relatively recent thing because there wasn’t much love during the Inquisition…
LikeLike
crikey — the ENTIRE system of modern Western Justice is founded upon the principles that were established in the Courts of the Inquisitions !!
Notion of innocent until proven guilty ? Courts of the Inquisitions
Notion of a right to self-defense ? Courts of the Inquisitions
Notion of a right to an impartial Judge ? Courts of the Inquisitions
MOST of those accused before these Courts were found innocent of all charges, and of those found guilty, the vast majority were subjected to simple acts of some religious penitence, monetary fines, brief imprisonment (often house arrest), or other such minor punishments — there are exactly as many abuses of the Justice system today as there were then, and just as horrid, and as for the death penalty it has only ever been the provision of the secular authorities.
Or were the lynch mobs or arbitrary local kangaroo courts that existed earlier better in some way ?
Yes, there were some often quite horrendous abuses in those Courts and their proceedings — but such abuses occur throughout the World in our own times, including in the modern West. It is very unreasonable to blame Christianity for these evils.
LikeLike
Are you seriously trying to tell me Julian that the Inquisition was a great thing because it brought in a justice system? What about the more than one million men, women and children who were tortured and slaughtered? Is that the price we had to pay for a court system?
LikeLike
the more than one million men, women and children who were tortured and slaughtered
I have no idea where you get that number from, but it is grossly exaggerated, to the point of caricature.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/16/artsandhumanities.internationaleducationnews
But according to Professor Agostino Borromeo, a historian of Catholicism at the Sapienza University in Rome and curator of the 783-page volume released yesterday, only 1% of the 125,000 people tried by church tribunals as suspected heretics in Spain were executed.
Even this correction is wrong, given that the vast majority of those sentenced to death were people like murderers, rapists, paedophiles, and brigands — the number of those condemned to death after trial by the Inquisitions for “heresy” is absolutely minuscule.
Your “more than one million … tortured and slaughtered” is an exaggeration of the actual number of death sentences, multiplying it by about 500 to 1000.
http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/inquisition.php
There were two major Inquisitions, the Medieval Inquisition and Spanish Inquisition. Although there are no exact numbers, scholars believe they have estimated Inquisition deaths reasonably accurately. There were not as many deaths as the popular press claims. Numbers have often been inflated to as high as 9 million by the popular press, with absolutely no scholarly research. This figure is completely erroneous. A broad range of scholars, many of whom were not Catholic, have carefully studied the Inquisitions. They looked at all the existing records and were able to extrapolate. In the Medieval Inquisition, Bernard Gui was one of the most notorious of the medieval inquisitors. He tried 930 people out of which 42 were executed (4.5%). Another famous Inquisitor was Jacques Fournier who tried 114 cases of which 5 were executed (4.3%). Using numbers that are known, scholars have been able to surmise that approximately 2,000 people died in the Medieval Inquisition. (1231-1400 AD)
According to public news reports the book’s editor, Prof. Agostino Borromeo, stated that about 125,000 persons were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, of which 1.8% were executed (2,250 people). Most of these deaths occurred in the first decade and a half of the Inquisition’s 350 year history. In Portugal of the 13,000 tried in the 16th and early 17th century 5.7% were said to have been condemned to death. News articles did not report if Portugal’s higher percentage included those sentenced to death in effigy (i.e. an image burnt instead of the actual person). For example, historian Gustav Henningsen reported that statistical tabulations of 50,000 recorded cases tried by nineteen Spanish tribunals between 1540-1700 found 775 people (1.7%) were actually executed while another 700 (1.4%) were sentenced to death in effigy (“El ‘banco de datos’ del Santo Oficio: Las relaciones de causas de la Inquisicion espanola, 1550-1700”, BRAH, 174, 1977). Jewish historian Steven Katz remarked on the Medieval Inquisition that “in its entirety, the thirteenth and fourteenth century Inquisition put very few people to death and sent few people to prison; 90 percent of its sentences were canonical penances” (The Holocaust in Historical Context, 1994).
The total number of death sentences is estimated to be a maximum of about 6000 over the 500 year History of these Courts — bearing in mind that a significant number of these were pardoned at a later date, or only symbolically executed, as seen above — which is a fairly ordinary number compared to other Western legal systems up til the beginning of the 20th Century and the start of the more serious movement for the abolishing of the death penalty.
The French Revolution executed about 40,000 over a 5-year period, for a comparison ; the US has executed 1448 since 1976 ; between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales ; Australia used to hang about 80 people a year in the 19th Century ; etc etc etc
—
I am not saying and have not suggested that Western Justice systems, including the Inquisitions, have not all improved since the Middle Ages — but the Inquisitions were positively benign compared to what passed for justice in the other Courts of the period.
LikeLike
another one in the spam queue because of links
LikeLike
And NO — I’m definitely not saying that the incorrect notion of Catholic guilt is rubbish “from an intellectual standpoint” — it’s rubbish because the Catholicity is pure & simple NOT centred around the concept of guilt.
LikeLike
From a review : http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2011/bvanhove_samharris_feb2011.asp :
The End of Faith is a caricature of organized Western religion and faith. He says “Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself” (131). And again “Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man” (226). The tone of the book is contemptuous in the extreme. Harris’s work rejects the contribution of Western-inspired (= Semitic) world religions to civilization and to our times. For the author, religion is a liability, political and social. His philosophical materialism has drawn him to work on a doctorate in neuroscience. He thinks anything that was good in religion can be found elsewhere. He thinks mystical states and religious impulses are located in the brain, not in a transcendent “totaliter aliter.” Hence his admiration for Buddhism and other Asian non-dualist systems of consciousness training (215-216; 283 n. 12). Now he is studying belief, disbelief, and uncertainty by way of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging).
—
The End of Faith is a caricature of organized Western religion and faith. He says “Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself” (131). And again “Indeed, we know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man” (226). The tone of the book is contemptuous in the extreme. Harris’s work rejects the contribution of Western-inspired (= Semitic) world religions to civilization and to our times. For the author, religion is a liability, political and social. His philosophical materialism has drawn him to work on a doctorate in neuroscience. He thinks anything that was good in religion can be found elsewhere. He thinks mystical states and religious impulses are located in the brain, not in a transcendent “totaliter aliter.” Hence his admiration for Buddhism and other Asian non-dualist systems of consciousness training (215-216; 283 n. 12). Now he is studying belief, disbelief, and uncertainty by way of fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging).
LikeLike
Jordan Peterson seems to be a far more sensible man than Harris.
LikeLike
LikeLike