CS Lewis, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray and the Quest for Religious Truth
I took my oldest kid to see a play about CS
Lewis last week because I wanted him to get a small taste incredible intellects
that have accepted and propounded upon Christianity for the last 2000 years.
A man who can read Homer in the Greek, Virgil in the Latin, the German
skeptics in the German, Dante in the Italian, and Voltaire in the French (and
understand them) is not a man to be scoffed at or dismissed out of hand.
Intellectuals today often dismiss Genesis as irrelevant fable and act as
if Darwin put the nail in the coffin of Judaism and Christianity by proving
that the Bible isn’t literally true, but everyone who knows anything about
Christian history knows that great men like Augustine and Origen acknowledged
the allegorical nature of Genesis 1500+ years before Darwin. It is only
straw men that Sam Harris is fighting with, but his near absolute ignorance of
history and ancient cultures doesn’t allow him to see that.
And this is why I find Jordan Peterson
such a frustrating intellectual adversary for Sam Harris. He almost
*never* references writings outside of the psychological literature which are
older than say the mid 1850’s. Formed in youth by fundamentalists who
took Genesis literally, he knows little about the cultures into which the Bible
was given. His interpretations of Scripture are focused on the
psychological and often lack any sort of depth or understanding beyond the
psychological. It’s like he’s spent his entire career studying the Great
Salt Lake as a biologist and is purporting to explain what life in Oceans is
like. This is still better than Sam
Harris, who pretends that seeing a few puddles in the desert gives him the
knowledge necessary to dismiss the existence of oceans, but it is a far cry from
a truly intellectual take on religion.
What Jordan Peterson does get, similar
to Douglas Murray, is that the “moral atheism” Sam Harris propounds is impotent
to stand in the way of truly murderous political ideologies like atheistic
Marxism and deistic Islam. The “moral atheism” of Sam Harris leads men to
wealth through the study and application of science when instantiated in
cultures such as ours, but it is inherently unstable because it relies on a
moral and cultural framework inherited from his Judeo-Christian ancestors.
When that broad societal Judeo Christian moral foundation is cut off from
its source, there is little to help people find meaning and the moral framework
necessary to maintain an open and free society.
A few people might be able to do so, drawing on the wisdom of the past
(usually their christian societal roots), but broad society can’t.
Lacking meaning and purpose, Europe can’t even reproduce enough to
perpetuate their culture. Such cultures
are unfit for survival according to the 2nd of Darwin’s twin pillars: sexual selection. And what will replace the western culture
we’ve built? I think we’re getting a
taste of it now: tribal warfare. We can
try and sanitize it, but make no mistake, we are headed for a very nasty future
if society doesn’t come up with a way to help people find meaning and purpose
and build actual families with children. In a world where 20% of women
*never* have a child, the average woman needs to bear 2.7 children to maintain
population levels. Short of that,
populations shrink and cultures wither and die.
It may take a few centuries, and it may appear to not be so bad at first
due to immigration from cultures that haven’t yet succumbed to the meaningless
that doesn’t even allow people to reproduce, but population decline is a
geometric function just like population growth.
Once it gets going, it is very difficult to stop. And how will countries respond to aggressive
cultures which believe in polygamy and send their excess men abroad in an
acknowledged bid of conquest?
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/youngfogey/2018/07/sam-harris-asks-questions-jordan-peterson-cant-answer/
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