Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "The Language of Creation | Matthieu Pageau | EP 292" video.

"The problem with imposing order on anything is you lose the connection to the transcendent" Well, it can be that order / rationality inevitably narrows your vision, to block out not only certain types of potential but also the combinatorial explosion you'd have if everything on a human scale could manifest all of its potentials at once. Can you make a distinction between the transcendent, and the merely combinatorial / potential?
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@JordanBPeterson If the transcendent is "the Way, the Truth, and the Light" (If I may steal some poetry), then isn't the Bible teaching that the Logos is transcendent? (Or Transcendence?) Is looking for Transcendence, simply looking for Proper Order?
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"There's this idea that we're on the verge of an ecological catastrophe" I went to see a "Cavalia" show once. Its theater was basically a circus tent for the horses to perform in. Being a modern entertainment it had a screen which at the beginning depicted a horse who had fallen down and seemed to be in great distress. "Oh great", I thought. "They're starting off the program showing us a movie of a dying horse." But I was mistaken. The horse was not dying. It was about to give birth. I'm not sure how we got so distracted -- maybe it's the challenge of the task ahead of us -- but when we actually have the capacity to move people OFF of this Earth, the idea that the solution to "there are too many people on the planet" is to sterilize ourselves, is sheer madness. Once SpaceX (or similar) can reduce the cost of reaching orbit to not much more than the cost of fuel, the amount of money it will cost to send one adult into space will be similar to what an American household spends on energy in a year. As long as we can produce most of what we need with what's up there already (and with all of our existing industrial knowhow and scientific capacity, whyever should we believe this is impossible?) settling the rest of the solar system will be within our reach very soon after we bother to take up the challenge. Earth can be delivered of us for good, in a way that will lead to our expansive thriving as well.
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So it seems like the Pageau brothers have developed a sort of theological twin language. That explains a lot. Would they be willing to do a series of conversations with someone like Paul Vanderklay, to help explicate some of their more esoteric shorthand?
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"The secondborn has time to ruminate on the problem" Practically speaking, parents have time to correct their own inexperience, with the secondborn.
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"How do we make sense of the multiplicity of the world?" Are they going to bring in Vervaeke's favorite concept of Relevance Realization?
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"Women need to help their husbands maintain the level of status that would make them happy" CS Lewis challenges this directly, seeing social climbing / ambition as an evil. Tolkien wrote a great deal about the evils of ambition as well.
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"To be as innocent as we were in the Garden and yet conscious and aware as adults is somehow better" The Fall was still a Fall. "Ye shall be as gods" was a lie. Wallowing in forbidden knowledge, playing at being your shadow / a dragon / superman, is still not what humans are to become.
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Esau is a short-term thinker, coming up with immediate solutions to immediate problems. This is how and why Jacob supplants him.
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"If science has redefined the terms the Earth and the Heavens as literally this one planet and the rest of the universe respectively, we need to remember that when these words were written that is not what they meant. We need to revisit the whole story from a symbolic point of view." and so ... "So why does the snake talk? That's unusual. And why can Eve understand it?" It's wonderful to see someone going back to the story for wisdom, instead of just trying to twist it towards some political point they would prefer to be true. (Although I may have spoken too soon. I'm not sure that Eve was talking to Nature exactly, when she was talking to the snake -- the snake is evil, after all.)
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"What if the apocalyptic dragon is so vast that you have to turn tyrant to defeat it? It means you're not the man for the job" What if no one is? What if your reaction to Obama's narcissistic "We are the ones we've been waiting for" was a sickening feeling in the pit of your stomach that he was only wrong in his confidence "we" (he) would prevail? Harrison Ford made his living in the movies by portraying the regular guy who's getting chewed on by events beyond his control. His popularity was in his resourcefulness in getting through these tight scrapes. It gives us hope. Only, his movies are fiction. Inspiring, yes, but sometimes stories don't turn out that way. Tolkien believed that all you can do is the best you can do, and the rest is up to God. Just do what you can within the bounds of ethics?
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"You may not be the person to take on the problem right now, as the firstborn has to" Weird reminder here, I read Emerson's essay on "Transcendentalism", which notes that your role in the workings of the world -- not exactly your time in the spotlight, but whatever your cue may be -- is probably not any given moment. "We also serve who only sit and wait", or just till the fields, or study, until the proper time in the grand scheme of things. I'm curious what Peterson could do with Emerson. (Or whoever it is that wrote "A Message to Garcia", to pull something from the Chautauqua circuit that Peterson seems to be heir to). It seems that there's an intellectual tradition in the New England / East Canadian region that could be pulled together to everyone's benefit.
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"David sees himself as united with Saul, he doesn't want to end Saul" Both are God's anointed - made in the image of God. This chivalry and brotherhood is the foundation of human rights.
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"It's good that the apple cart gets upset, because that's how you advance to the next stage" Hold on, hold on, hold on. The Genesis / Garden story is, like most of the tragedies of the Old Testament, fundamentally a cautionary tale. There is a fundamental difference between God calling Abraham out of his father's tents, and God building a garden for Adam and Eve and warning them against what will lead to their being driven from it.
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