Posted on 05/04/2024 6:18:33 AM PDT by Twotone
I waited in line alongside a woman with a cane wearing a cross necklace and a group of teenage boys in board shorts. A blind man was led along by two other gentlemen past a well-dressed lady in petite black heels and her suit-wearing date. A toddler held her daddy's hands as we entered into the arena and were met with the overwhelming smell of funnel cake.
The Dickies Arena in Fort Worth can hold up to 14,000 people. As I took my seat, bright screens in every direction advertised the upcoming entertainment: Disney On Ice, Dierks Bentley, Justin Timberlake.
“So what brings you to the Jordan Peterson tour?” I asked the man next to me over the sound of classical music mingled with popcorn-munching that flowed through the air.
“I got some things I want to wrestle with God about,” he said and gestured to the projection of the tour's title on the front screen: We Who Wrestle with God Tour.
“And the best part is,” he told me, “I 'cash flowed' the whole thing. No credit card.”
He was an Uber driver who had worked extra hours to afford this night out because he thought, “I ought to do something for myself.” He’d found Jordan Peterson’s videos online and realized that “a lot of what he was talking about is the way I was raised.”
A live musician took the stage. As he plucked the first notes on his guitar, my new friend next to me leaned over to my husband to say that he got off early and went to Buc-ee's before this.
“This and Buc-ee's makes for the perfect day.”
His easygoing demeanor and untucked polo shirt defied the typical nose-in-the-classics intellectual stereotype you might expect at an academic lecture. He had not brought his pocket "Poetics," nor did he try to assert his own intelligence with a nonchalant reference to one of Dostoevsky’s lesser-known works. He never said “penultimate,” “epistemological," or "a priori." Instead, he sipped his Diet Coke and tapped his foot along to the music
As more and more people filled the arena, my husband leaned over to me and whispered, “We are all here to hear a man ponder.” We laughed at the idea. In a few months, Justin Timberlake would pack this same arena and bring the ladies to their knees with another rendition of "SexyBack." But tonight, we were gathered to listen to a lecture about God from a Canadian psychologist.
Jordan Peterson took the stage with the charisma of a soft-spoken elder trying to make a crucial decision for his tribe. His hands were pressed in front of his lips as he paced, speaking extemporaneously and pausing to think for a length of time that would make any professional speaker blush.
The question at hand for the night’s lecture was, in essence, “Why God?”
As Peterson mused aloud over women's attraction to men who can dance (a tangent well worth exploring, in my opinion) I had to ask myself, “Why are we all here?”
What was it about this 61-year-old clinical psychologist’s exploration of the Bible that had drawn Texans out in droves on a Monday night?
I couldn’t imagine we were there for the spectacle – for the thrill. Peterson is an engaging speaker, but his presentation is still essentially a lecture – 90 minutes of what he calls "the theater of the mind."
Were we there for advice, or inspiration? Arguably a man who writes a book called "12 Rules for Life" is offering a kind of "self-help." But Peterson's presentation lacks the flashy stagecraft, dramatic epiphanies and dopamine-releasing rituals that accompany most motivational speakers.
Besides, I had “helped” myself quite enough, actually. I’d taken the latest personality tests, adopted some “Atomic Habits,” gave up sugar, and tried cold-showers. I worked out everyday, did calming breathing exercises, and kept a tightly organized personal planner.
But there are some things even a good Pilates session and the “power of positive thinking” can’t fix. I remembered what my seat neighbor had said: I got some things I want to wrestle with God about. Then it hit me: like the man sitting next to me, I wasn't there for the high-falutin' thrill of mental gymnastics. I was there because I had some sh** to work out.I wasn’t there for self-help. I was there for God-help.
The online portal to submit a question for Jordan featured a way to “upvote” different comments to push them to the top of the feed. Here are some of the questions people were asking:
“What is the meaning of life and why should I care?
“What is the most important verse in the Bible to live by?”
“Was Jesus everything he claimed to be, per what we read in the Gospels?”
“Is there any way to have an absolute moral structure apart from religion?’”
‘’’How do you forgive what seems like an unforgivable act?”
One audience member wrote, “I struggle with my sexuality. I don't want this life for me. I'm a devoted, conservative-leaning Christian, I don't know what to do. What are your opinions?”
He was there, like me, like the Uber driver to my right, to wrestle with God.
Then there was the man to my left — my husband.
It wasn't that long ago that he was a teenager disillusioned by the church and drawn to New Atheist leaders like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. For many curious young people, New Atheism was the satisfyingly rebellious answer to religion's seeming inability to address the hard questions.
Those same seekers, after some time and deeper thought, also found the proposal of a godless world to be unreasonable and hollow.
What was a disillusioned atheist to do next?
Enter Dr. Jordan Peterson, a man who has never publicly confessed adherence to any particular faith and yet travels the world teaching about Abraham and Moses to packed stadiums as if he’s Billy Graham.
Why?
As he said in the lecture that night, “We've come to a time when we have to understand what the stories our culture is predicated on actually mean." In his opinion, the Bible is that story, and with it, we've created “arguably the greatest culture on earth. … If you want to keep the culture, keep the story. If you want to keep the story, you have to keep God.”
As I shuffled out of the arena with my chocolate-chip cookie wrapper, I heard a man behind me offer the pointed observation that Jordan, a somewhat religiously ambiguous man who had paced the stage in a suit jacket patterned with the faces of saints, “is more Christian than most Christians.”
I thought about my husband again and the hours of conversations we’d had as he’d listened to Jordan Peterson’s lecture series on the book of Genesis.
We had talked about Cain and Abel and the nature of evil, the power of words to speak life into existence, and the idea that men are created in the image of God. They were the conversations I’d been desperate to have since we’d met in college but never knew how to start.
I suppose that’s one of the reasons I love Peterson, because he gave me the gift of those conversations — and not only with my husband, but with people everywhere.
Even if Peterson hadn't claimed to take the Bible literally, he’d taken it seriously. He’d pursued the ancient writings with the vigor that the intellectual class typically reserved for Darwin and Freud. For me, his influence shattered the false separation of intellect and faith.
If only I could only go back to my college theory courses, raise my scared little hand, and say, “That’s really fascinating that Nietzsche said 'God is dead,’ but how does that hold up in the face of the Genesis account?”
With the wind of Peterson’s high-level biblical analysis at my back, I would tell every professor that I would be bringing both my God and my reason into class, thank you very much.
But there was no Jordan Peterson when I waded the godless waters of academia, not yet.
Today there are “Jordan Petersons” popping up everywhere. They're blowing the dust off their old Bibles and saying, “Hey, before we throw all our norms and ethics down the memory hole, why don't we give this God guy a shot?” Honestly, what do we have to lose? Or, even more honestly, do we have any other options?
If we had other options, would we still have men like Jordan Peterson? Or are men like him only forged in times like these?
My husband and I had parked at a church down the street. As he opened the car door to let me in, I noticed the stream of fellow audience members passing under the steeple. The modest silver cross was only barely visible by the dim glow of streetlights.
We drove home talking about God.
“why don’t we give this God guy a shot?” Honestly, what do we have to lose? Or, even more honestly, do we have any other options?”.
While I find him on point on most topics, I also find him condescending, somewhat whiny and with an overriding aura of weakness.
Thanks for posting, this and may other things give hope to us that there is a turning back to God. The reaction at many colleges to all of this Hamas stuff.
The Latin mass is very popular at many parishes, where one must arrive early to get a seat.
He was good when he wasn’t famous yet. Wrote a self-help book with common sense advice for young people like “clean your room”.
Then he got “internet madness” and started to argue with leftist internet morons and after that he had a personal life tragedy and to cope fried his brain with drugs and nowadays he is often just a guy with a drug-fried brain.
You get a glimpse of common sense calm advice from time to time and that’s when the old him is talking ... and then you get the nonsense of the new him where he has fits of rage about some New Jersey town’s parking regulations or Sesame Street worm muppet.
That aura of weakness is deceptive. The demagogues of the left have been trying to take him down for the last decade.
While I respect Dr. Peterson and listen to his non-theological podcasts, I wouldn’t seek him out for answers about God.
He is very intelligent, and works hard to be honest in his own approach, but his baseline is evolutionary biology and a Jungian mindset. He almost reminds me of a non-leftist version of the 1960s religious writers who discount or ignore the events in the history in the Bibles as being too important to treat as facts, but looking only for the hidden meaning in the myths. It is also dangerous to try to find a novel approach in such well-trod ground, especially if Christian, as the Christian Faith includes revealed Truth, spoken plainly, and not in Gnostic secrets. Dr. Peterson isn’t a Gnostic, but he comes closer to their approaches than I care for.
On the other hand, his wife’s highly unlikely cure through prayer and her own “faith journey” have led her to the Catholic Church, and praying of the Rosary.
I have listened to Dr. Peterson since about 2016, and he had been a politically middle-of-the-road Canadian (which is left of a m-o-r American in most ways. My wife and in-laws are from the same part of Canada, in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Dr. Peterson has responded extremely well to the attempts to compel speech out of him as an academic, and that has moved him to the right, and he isn’t done.
I greatly appreciate that he is fighting a necessary great fight.
With the exception of Jesus, God didn’t send perfect people to spread the message.
“With the exception of Jesus, God didn’t send perfect people to spread the message.”
Why didn’t he? Sounds like God screwed up.
You ever met a perfect person?
Sean Ryan just did a lengthy interview with Dr Peterson. It’s worth watching.
L
Apparently we are born imperfect?
Apparently
Every opinion I ever hear about atheism is from non-atheists - and they are invariably laced with profound condescension and reductionism.
Without getting into the question of who is right and whether or not they can prove it, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that neither the believers or the non-believers have any clue about each other’s true character, nor do either have any business speaking on behalf of the other.
Here, I will tip my hat to the non-believers, for they do a far better job of staying in their lane.
The non-believers I know (and that includes myself) are at peace with not knowing things beyond the reach of science, but know that there is a vast universe of mysteries - they are humbled by the vastness of unknown wonders, and open and eager to learn about them should that ever become possible.
That self-description of one atheist’s state of mind may not 100% apply to every atheist - but I’d venture to say that it is a whole lot closer to the mark than the reductive and condescending descriptions typically offered by religious believers.
If those things are his true personality, then that’s good. There’s an abundance of fake personalities in politics, media, science, and even in pulpits.
Well why didn’t God build us perfect? Or wasn’t he capable of that? He did it with one of his sons, why didn’t he do for all his other sons?
Think of all the misery that would have prevented, not to mention him worrying about whether we think he’s the supreme being or not.
He could have saved us and him a lot of grief, don’t you think?
>> Well why didn’t God build us perfect? Or wasn’t he capable of that? He did it with one of his sons, why didn’t he do for all his other sons? <<
He did build us perfect. Then Adam and Eve ate the apple...
And to answer the usual next question: if God forced us to be good, then we would be mere robots.
Yeah, atheists would never use condescending terms like "sky daddy" and "flying spaghetti monster".
My favorite
Is there any way to have an absolute moral structure apart from religion?’”
Sorry to say many organized religions have spoiled the God experience
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