Altfish
Veteran Member
I'm not arguing with you (Or don't think I am) I'm just saying why I think he is a fraud. A very good speaker/debater but a fraud.
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Religion And New Atheists
- Thread starter Earthling
- Start date
He comes across as sincere to me.
But ultimately, he has very little to say that is actually useful. His actual role is that of a confusing distraction from the real subject matter.
Augustus
…
Seems like a pretty standard discussion of the history of Western society combined with a promotion of his worldview. His flowery language, rhetoric flourishes and hyperbole seem to be somewhat of an affectation to seem more 'profound' than he really is.
Peterson's main focus seems to be on protecting a conservative notion of the classically liberal Western society. I'd view his comments much more in this regard than any specifically religious agenda. He views Christianity as the foundations of such worldview as opposed to something which needs to be 'true' in a religious sense.
How I would interpret his arguments:
He sees it as a mistake that New Atheists treat religion like a scientific proposition, and believe its value comes from whether it is true or false.
Instead, it is a narrative that draws it's value from utility in creating social cohesion.
A common problem of modernity, the belief we can transcend our human limitations to solve out problems. The hubristic faith in Reason.
This can take many forms, from 'extreme' utopian examples like Marxism (a kind of eschatology), or more moderate, gradual examples like melioristic progress (a kind of Divine Providence).
The primacy of the individual as a moral agent, the foundation of liberalism. Most societies throughout history have operated on a collectivist moral foundation.
[He is right that this owes a great debt to (Pauline) Christianity though. Paul is really the grandfather of liberalism.]
Again relating to the liberal Western order, the open society.
He believed that when you removed the foundation of Western civilisation (Christianity), then the whole thing will eventually collapse due to fragmentation and infighting between competing ideological narratives.
From Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being, the Hebertists Cult of Reason, Comte's Religion of Humanity, many who believed we had outgrown traditional religions believed they must be replaced in order to maintain social cohesion. Alternatively you have Romantic notions of Blood and Soil (Nazism being the extreme example), or Marxists' class solidarity and providential beliefs in the triumph of the proletariat, you have societies organised around a replacement for religion.
His belief is that we can't simply create 'pick and mix' ideologies where we dispassionately use reason to choose that which is good and expect society to adhere to this. This presupposes that we are rational creatures who will act in accordance to collective well being. As we are not individually or collectively rational though, we can't expect reason to save us.
As is self-evident, it's much easier to say 'I believe in world peace' than it is to achieve this.
If we can't live without myths of some form, it's better the devil you know as if something has stood the test of time, it likely has value.
Like Chesterton's fence:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
He believes New Atheists don't really understand what they are trying to destroy.
So it seems.
As I said, it is a very confused message, to say nothing of how misinformed it is.
He makes a lot of claims, and does not really attempt to support many, if any.
We end up wondering why he takes sides so arbitrarily when the obvious question would be whether he even considered the alternatives.
As it turns out, the alternatives are far more convincing than his proposal.
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Agreed. But there is also the matter of how unnecessarily arbitrary his perspective is, and how little responsibility he takes for that.
Basically, he complains that people do not understand that he is right and those who disagree with him are wrong. Just because.
Pretty much. Which has the twin defects of being both arbitrary and unsupported while also being a very questionable presentation of the very subject matter that he claims to be misunderstood and deserving of more respect.
The considerable number of people who make that mistake - which is serious, indeed - tends to not be atheists, "new" or of any other flavor.
Which is why it must accept and deal with questions about that value.
Peterson is trying to claim that it is unfair to make that questioning. That just won't fly.
That would carry some weight if presented in itself. Not so much when appeal to a supernaturalist Logos is presented as a better alternative.
If anything, that refuge in Logos has every single downside of the presumed "faith in Reason" and many more of its own.
Or, far more often, claims of a perfect monotheistic revelation that promises Salvation in exchange to unquestioning submission.
That is a lot of claim for anyone to make.
It is hardly believable that Paul would make much of a difference in the overall ability of humanity to realize that individual people can be legitimate contributors to the overall good.
On the contrary, such a realization was just about unavoidable. Paul and the New Testament in general may or may not have been early proponents, but that is of very little consequence even if true.
Appeal to truth as a necessary value is really not very deep a realization. It borders on platitude, at least without some attempt at explaining its consequences and relevance, which I don't think he really tried to give.
He could learn from Sam Harris, who is a passionate and insightful proponent of truth as a moral value.
Fair enough, but the interesting question to ask is not whether people will attempt to maintain or replace "religion" in that sense (or perhaps more accurately, ideologies based on monotheism and passive obedience to God's will or some other variety of abstract higher imperative).
Instead, a more relevant question to ask is whether we should strive to care for the forms that such efforts take, or instead pursue some better alternative (or more than one).
Peterson seems to want to purposefully neglect that question, as if he saw it as somehow illegitimate. That is a very glaring flaw of his attempts at argumentation. Yet he refuses to address it, instead declaring dogmatically there there is a vaguely theistic and mysteriously trustworthy "logos" that somehow is unfairly opposed by atheists.
That is a very misguided claim, and a remarkably unsupported one.
That is somewhat correct... but his advice is then to make things even worse by adhering to appreciation of the ill-defined, elusive, vaguely theistic and apparently authoritarism-loving "logos" simply because unity, even under such circunstances and with such caveats, is to be presumed better than the supposedly chaotic (and only?) alternative.
If we can't live without myths of some form, it's better the devil you know as if something has stood the test of time, it likely has value.[/quote]
Arguable at best. Including the part about it having stood the test of time. People criticize those traditions for a reason.
One serious flaw in that argument is that it presumes that what exists must have a discernible reason. An even more serious one is that it decrees, for no obvious reason and with no apparent support, that it is always best to refuse to substitute or improve on things that we do not really understand.
Augustus
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I have to agree with him on that point at least.
His explanation might be a bit confusing, but his overall message isn't confused. I can understand why many people wouldn't agree with it, but it's fairly straightforward.
It's basically classical conservatism with a bit of rhetorical tinsel to make it seem more profound than it actually is.
Similar ideas were expressed far more eruditely and with greater depth the philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He considered our faith in the power of human reason to be hubristic, and that salvation through reason [neo-Gnosticism] and the perfectibility of man [neo-Pelagianism] to be both false and dangerous.
As such he argued for the retention of Christianity as the foundational myth of Western society, even if you didn't literally believe Jesus died for your sins.
Beliefs could be revised and updated if necessary: "What we must do now is to follow, like good conservatives, the generations before us and make our Christianity as they made theirs"
Basically, just a mythology that acts as a cultural touchstone to mitigate the hubristic tendencies that make us believe we are smart enough to make the world into whatever we please, as well as acting as a source for a common identity.
It seems not too dissimilar to your idea of religion without 'silly theistic notions', although perhaps I'm mistaken.
You have it back to front.
People always believed individuals could contribute to the overall good, that is the essence of collectivism. What they didn't appreciate was that individuals have value beyond their contribution to the overall good.
When the transition from the Classical Graeco-Roman society to the Christian one occurred, you can clearly see this view evolving. Human value came from Genesis creation, and individualism grew from individual moral responsibility before God.
Perhaps @Vouthon can point you in the direction of one of his threads/posts that eruditely discusses this via the primary sources.
I saw that as a separate point, where logos, in his context, meaning 'source of purpose or meaning'. He was saying that many men lack purpose in modern society because they have lost their traditional role in society.
The chaotic point relates to undermining the entire value system via failure to acknowledge where it came from, and creating a free for all where people just make up their own value systems and society fragments. The argument is that any society needs some form of ideology that provides a basic level of social cohesion. When society becomes divide between too many incompatible belief systems, you have chaos and the death of that society.
It is a heuristic, not an iron law.
The idea being that what has survived a long time probably has value, as things without value tend not to survive a long time. See Lindy effect - Wikipedia
I don't know if you watch/read Game of Thrones, but if you do think of The Wall/Night's Watch in that (if you don't this will be a terrible analogy).
Intellectuals like Tyrion mock these as some stupid relic of the past that protects people from 'grumpkins and snarks' and stop a few primitive wildlings from raiding the North.
Yet he doesn't consider that things that took great effort to create and preserve may have had a good reason for existence that he doesn't comprehend. Just because he can't see the logic behind them, doesn't mean the logic doesn't exist, as ;water becomes apparent, but only after it is too late.
We tend to think we are much smarter than the people in the past and that we are much better judges of utility due to 'progress'.
Oakeshott:
There are some minds which give us the sense that they have passed through an elaborate education which was designed to initiate them into the traditions and achievements of their civilization; the immediate impression we have of them is an impression of cultivation, of the enjoyment of an inheritance.
But this is not so with the mind of the Rationalist, which impresses us as, at best, a finely-tempered, neutral instrument, as a well-trained rather than as an educated mind. Intellectually, his ambition is not so much to share the experience of the race as to be demonstrably a self-made man. And this gives to his intellectual and practical activities an almost preternatural deliberateness and self consciousness, depriving them of any element of passivity, removing from them all sense of rhythm and continuity and dissolving them into a succession of climacterics, each to be surmounted by a tour de raison.
His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void. And having cut himself off from the traditional knowledge of his society, and denied the value of any education more extensive than a training in a technique of analysis, he is apt to attribute to mankind a necessary inexperience in all the critical moments of life, and if he were more self-critical he might begin to wonder how the race had ever succeeded in surviving. With an almost poetic fancy, he strives to live each day as if it were his first
@ChristineM asked me to clarify the kind of "truth" I was talking about, which I did above, in post #8. I think that the religious version of truth tends to be things taken more on faith than on evidence.
Augustus
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Was referring to your idea that our salvation lies in truth which draws on a Christian heritage.
There is no salvation, and if there were truth wouldn't be a great means to get there. Civilisation relies on fictions after all.
Yes, they accuse the new atheist to be ignorant of theology. But that is as ridicolus as accusing skeptics of leprechauns to ignore leprechaunology.
Ciao
- viole
As an old atheist, I never saw any need to know the myriad of theologies out there.
Neither did I study astrology, palmistry, phrenology, tasseography, or throwing bones.
There are about three large claims and threads of ideas in this single post.
(I numbered your claims)1 - Perhaps. Does the history of the origin of the idea help this discussion in some way?
2a - How are you defining "salvation"?
2b - Can't respond to this claim until we understand how you're defining salvation.
3 - Again, a large topic here that depends on a few definitions.
I have a similar thought. I think that in the last couple of years, he's had a couple of really important ideas to share. But sadly, those have been a part of a lot of partially formed, less useful ideas.
Sincerely, do you have an example or two of fraudulent intentions or claims from Peterson?
Altfish
Veteran Member
His definition of religion is one.
In general, I don't think a definition is enough to claim fraud. I think you also have to have some plausible suspicion of intent, no?
Altfish
Veteran Member
It is a fraudulent way to win a debate. If it wasn't his intention then why redefine a word?
Augustus
…
You seem to misunderstand his point:
"We all require subjective, fundamental axioms on which to base our worldview. Whatever these are for you are the functional equivalent of a god"
The idea of god serves a function in preserving and transmitting cultures as well as creating meaning and purpose.
If you don't believe in god then you still need something(s) to fulfil these needs. As such there is little fundamental difference between atheistic and theistic belief systems in this regard.
Why assume he was doing that disingenuously in order to win a debate rather than to explain his opinion on an issue?
Augustus
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It relates to certain points raised by JP.
Also, it's the reason why certain beliefs that many consider to be universal, are in fact products of localised culture.
As metaphorically as possible. Ultimately the idea that there is a solution to such problems, rather than them being inescapable aspects of human society.
Stuff that's not true that we use to create worldviews and structure societies. That which makes us 'civilised' rather than mere animals, human rights for example, or equality.
Altfish
Veteran Member
But that is rubbish.
'God' is defined as some thing like "a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity."
Now, me , being an atheist, has absolutely no equivalent that fits that description. But to redefine it as you have outlined is ingenuine.
OK maybe not fraudulent but certainly untruthful.
Augustus
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He explained how he was using the term though (albeit not very well). You can disagree with him, but it is not untruthful.
It is a fair enough point though. For example:
When liberalism developed in the West, it was underpinned for some by a Christian idea of Divine Providence. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, rejected the 'fairy tale' aspects of Christianity but still kept to a form of Providential Deism combined with secularised Christian ethics. Others went a step further, and rejected the idea of God completely, yet still kept to similar ethics combined with a secular Idea of Progress which was the same as Christian and Deistic Providence.
Whatever underpinned the atheistic belief system was thus functionally equivalent to God in this regard.