June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:20
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Well, let's start with your claim. | |
| How do you define the God that you're rejecting? | |
| Like, what is God to you? | |
| You studied in the church. | |
| You found that unsatisfactory. | |
| How would you characterize what you rejected? | |
| I think the average Christian believer, when they say that they're Christian and they believe, they mean some sort of God that is all-powerful, all-perfect, is somehow involved. | |
| In the matters of this world, and that we look to them through wisdom and with the Logos incarnate in Christ, it also seems like you don't believe in religion in the way that the average Christian says that they believe in religion. | |
| And there are as many gods out there as there are believers, because everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is. | |
| Okay, so I think it started off fairly well, just so you know, right? | |
| It started off fairly well in that he defined God as all-powerful, all-virtuous, that is involved in the natural world to some degree, because otherwise there'd be no point praying for intercession. | |
| And then he says everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is. | |
| I mean, there's certainly some truth in that. | |
| Not the mutually exclusive. | |
| Mutually exclusive is oppositional. | |
| It's win-lose. | |
| And there are a lot of people who believe there wouldn't be denominations if people didn't have some I think? | |
| be these things if people didn't have any shared definition. | |
| So mutually exclusive, yeah. | |
| It also has been shown that people brought up in more punitive and aggressive environments that they were sort of beaten as children tend to have a more aggressive view of God as punitive, and people brought up in more gentle environments. | |
| Most environments tend to have a more gentle view of God. | |
| It's more New Testament and forgiveness-based and so on, right? | |
| So, an eye for an eye is for the people who were raised violently, and turn the other cheek generally tends to forgive, tends to be for people who are raised more gently. | |
| So, definitely your upbringing has something to do with it. | |
| But Jordan Peterson, to his credit, right, when he says, this young man says, everybody has mutually exclusive. | |
| Well, if everybody had mutually exclusive views of what God is, no one could speak to each other. | |
| The mere fact of communication presumes a commonality of assumption and definition. | |
| And it's certainly not the case that I regard any archetypal manifestation whatsoever as equally religious. | |
| So that's not a real claim. | |
| Let me give you an example, for example. | |
| Sub-narrative in the story of Moses, where Moses is rewarded with a glimpse of God. | |
| And that's one of the ways that God is characterized in the Old Testament stories. | |
| Now, Moses is a faithful servant of God and a good man. | |
| At least that's the case within the confines of the story. | |
| One possible interpretation. | |
| It's the case within the confines of the story. | |
| Obviously. | |
| When we look at the Bible, the Bible can't precisely say anything because there are so many different exegetical and hermeneutic views of this particular book. | |
| And that everybody has disagreed historically on, it seems like, even the most benign detail about a book this big. | |
| And it seems... | |
| Yeah, so, I mean, one of the reasons that I left... | |
| And you can make a case for just about anything. | |
| And I recognized that I was simply trying to hone an ability I already had, which was to make a good case for just about anything. | |
| Like I was on the debate team. | |
| I was vice president of the debate club, traveled all over Canada to debate. | |
| My very first year, I came in sixth or seventh in Canada. | |
| So I was already good at debating, and in debating, be it resolved, B-I-R-T, be it resolved that, you just get a case, and you just argue for or against it, depending on which side you're on. | |
| So you have to be good at arguing any kind of case, which I'm already good at. | |
| So I felt that the English degree wasn't doing much for me, and I wanted to be in a slightly more objective realm, which was history, which at the time I thought was more objective, though now I'm not quite so sure. | |
| So anyway, so Jordan Peterson's trying to make a case about Moses and a glimpse of God. | |
| And he says Moses is a good man, at least within the confines of the story. | |
| Okay, so fair. | |
| And he's saying, well, but there's a lot of subjectivity and so on in the Bible, and people believe different things, so it's hard to come up with sort of facts. | |
| But anyway, let's go on. | |
| It seems like you can only say that the Bible says something if you first presuppose that it's univocal. | |
| So your claim essentially is that Moses in the Old Testament plays the role of a villain or is irrelevant? | |
| Because the alternative claim is that he's good. | |
| Right. | |
| So, this is a false dichotomy. | |
| So, Jordan Peterson says Moses is good, and this guy is saying it's really hard to say, and then he's saying, oh, so you're saying he's a villain, and it's like, no, it's just that you can't say anything in particular in detail about the Bible. | |
| Now, he actually might be serving Jordan Peterson's point here that atheists reject God without really understanding what God is. | |
| Because if this guy's saying, well, our knowledge of God, to some degree, comes through the Bible, and the Bible is kind of incomprehensible and complicated and subjective, well, then, maybe that's enough to reject God. | |
| Because we can't talk to those authors. |
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