Comments by "Regis" (@Timbo5000) on "Jordan B Peterson"
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If they were talking about non-scripturebased religions this discussion would be a lot simpler. Religions in general are in my view very useful as sources of value systems (heuristic in nature), but certain religions have committed the ultimate sin: adopt a scripture, claim your values from 2000 years ago are literal words of god and will remain relevant forever. And that's pretty much the Abrahamic religions in general. If you look purely at more conventional religions like pagan beliefs over all kinds of societies, all you see is a collection of stories (which, importantly, are NOT claimed to be a literal truth) which tell us archetypal truths and grant us a value system. And under religion without scripture, rationality has free reign to counterbalance its values where necessary. Our collective unconscious provides us with low-resolution information on archetypal truths and values and whatnot in the form of culture and religion, which is valuable information. But sometimes our rationality catches up with or even supersedes the low-resolution information it provides us with its own high-resolution factual explanation of why something is good or better than our religion/culture. You need a balance between the two: the rational side for obvious reasons, but also the unconscious to supplement our rationality where it is insufficient to calculate what is good.
We need to stop looking at religion as something "true" in the literal sense or completely irrelevant. Religion is produced by us as humans and it is useful to provide values where our rationality lacks the capability to produce them. On the other side of the token, rationality is useful to provide values in general and to override religion where necessary. Neither is "superior" over the other, both are highly important to the functioning of our societies.
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