Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Differences With Jordan Peterson (Pt. 3) | Michael Shermer | ACADEMIA | Rubin Report" video.

  1. The ancients came up with all kinds of mythological explanations for things. "You have a dragon in your belly!" And the treatment for "dragon in the belly" was some herb, and that herb - it was said - would calm the angry dragon. Of course it wasn't a dragon in the belly. But the herb cured the stomach ailment, and the dragon myth became "science." I think Peterson's trying to get at how we humans have (psychological) archetypes that seem to be hard-wired into our brains from birth. Universality of red = blood, light = wisdom, for instance (pulling these outta my ass, here). Actual scholars can tell you the common threads found between all religions. Religions grapple with unanswerable (by science) questions about life, death, and meaning. None of them are perfect. All of them address a deep need in the human psyche for meaning. True or false, it doesn't matter, IF THEY WORK. And even if they. DON'T work, people will eagerly embrace belief systems (faiths) that resonate with them. Now put all this into a hopper and turn the time crank millions of years, from pre-human, to the first self-aware human, on to today. We in the West think in terms of Christianity, which derives from Judaism, which derives at least party from the Egyptians, which derives from archetypes apparently hard-wired in humans since pre-historic times. What we're coming to find out is that it's irrational to hold religious convictions. It's also irrational NOT to hold religious convictions! And it turns out that the ABSENCE of any over-arching meaning for life is a sure path to extinction. That's why atheism is irrational. Without the mystical, society's not stable enough for scientific advancement. Scientific advancement exposes all the holes in religious doctrine. Rejecting religion leads to extinction, because religion fills a psychological need in self-aware, MORTAL beings. Without the religion, humanity stagnates. WITH religion (or its political-ideology substitutes), we devolve into hedonism, nihilism, and totalitarianism, replacing God and Morality with Government and Law. I don't think Peterson is offering any kind of final answers to these phenomena. He's just pointing them out, and he has some PRACTICAL ways of coping that seem to help people live better lives. Life is suffering. Life is uncertain. Life is TEMPORARY. How do we resolve these facts of life in such a way as to keep life on the up-tick, without descending into chaos? Without harming others or imposing our will on others by force? That's kind of the role of religion. Finding things that WORK over long time periods, spanning many generations of finite-lived human beings? My PERSONAL solution is to be scientific, with an overlay of "God is watching" and "Jesus loves me" from my early upbringing. It's superstitious. It's silly. But it helps ME interpret the world around me using reason to judge what IS and LOVE to set the goalposts. Over time, I try to work towards what SHOULD be, by understanding what IS.
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