Showing posts with label Jordan Peterson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jordan Peterson. Show all posts

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Contradictions and Contradistinctions

Yesterday I was listening to a secular scholar again. (Okay, it was JP.)

He was speaking about the Bible, its value as a text and its importance in human history. At the same time, he was expressing disbelief about how it had persisted. It’s a “strange old book”, he said. It’s “contradictory” and “cobbled together”. He puzzled over how it was possible it could ever have “such an unbelievable impact on civilization”. But at the same time, he concluded, “However educated you are, you are not educated enough to discuss the typological significance of the biblical stories.”

And then he went on to try.

Thursday, September 14, 2023

A Nation of Useful Idiots

This isn’t going to be a nice post. It’s going to be rude, pointed and blunt. It’s definitely going to offend a lot of people … maybe as many as half of our readers. But that’s also one difference we at Coming Untrue have long prized in comparison to some other, more diplomatic sites: we’re not going to back down on principle in order to stroke an audience.

If political correctness and flattery are what you like, you’d maybe better move on now.

Thursday, December 29, 2022

The God Point

Everybody’s on the JBP train today, it seems.

I mean the “Jordan B. Peterson” train. For those who have been living under a rock (or perhaps have no love for YouTube or other media), Dr. Peterson has been the center of much rapt attention over the last couple of years. How a psychologist and philosopher of religion rose to the pinnacle of worldwide publicity is quite an odd story. Starting with his principled stand against transgenderism and compelled speech in Toronto, continuing with his publications in print and on YouTube, and then in widely-viewed and controversial interviews on worldwide television, JBP has positioned himself as the most famous public intellectual of recent years.

Wednesday, December 07, 2022

Semi-Random Musings (27)

I have written once or twice about the use of disambiguators in scripture. These are the little bits of information the Bible’s writers supply in order to help us distinguish James (the brother of Christ) from James (the brother of John) or Mary (Magdalene) from Mary (the mother of Jesus).

The Benaiah who served David and Solomon is consistently called the son of Jehoiada. Good to know. With that disambiguator appended to his name it’s impossible to confuse him with two later Benaiahs mentioned by Ezra and Ezekiel, or with Benaiah of Pirathon, another man of valor in David’s service.

Saturday, March 05, 2022

Mining the Minors: Hosea (17)

There is a point when national decline accelerates to such an extent that even those most in denial about it cannot ignore it anymore. I suspect we have arrived at it in Canada in the last few weeks.

Everybody knows something is disastrously wrong. Due process, the law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all being ignored. Thousands have taken to the streets to express their unhappiness with the choices made for them by their government. Nobody knows what will happen next. In this recent video, Jordan Peterson and writer Rex Murphy call it “The Catastrophe of Canada”. Canadians who are not still getting their news from the CBC would agree that “catastrophe” is no exaggeration.

Back in Hosea, the same sudden awareness of impending disaster had come for Israel: “Ephraim saw his sickness.”

Thursday, April 01, 2021

The Era of the Gentle and Reverent Lie

This morning a new video appeared on YouTube.

To my surprise, it had arch-atheist Bill Maher in admiring conversation with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the pro-Christian conservative.

This is Bill Maher, who personally coined the insult “religulous” to describe all religions. But here he was, literally stumbling over himself to give a platform to someone who claims that understanding religion, and particularly Christianity, is vital to the survival and future well being of Western culture.

Amazing.

Thursday, March 11, 2021

Magination Run Wild

Ah, liberal Christians.

How they do let their Maginations run wild sometimes.

You’ll see what I mean in a minute.

First, a little history ...

Lining Things Up

The Maginot Line was a massive French fortification that ran 943 miles between the Alps and the English Channel. The brainchild of Minister of War André Maginot, it was designed to repel attacks from Germany. The horrors of the trench warfare in the first “War to End All Wars” had persuaded the French of the need for better national defenses. The Maginot Line had everything going for it: super thick concrete, steel-wedge gun turrets that were impervious to bombardment, large, air-conditioned living areas for troops, supply storehouses, its own railway …

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Contradictions and Contradistinctions

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

The Point of Faith

“I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

Imagine for a second that at the time you came to Christ you had been told that your life from this day forward was to be characterized by people throwing rocks at you, telling lies about you, betraying you and letting you down, calling you names, hitting you, throwing you in jail and trying to kill you. Moreover, in addition to all the abuse you could expect as a matter of course from your fellow man for the sake of your testimony to Christ, you could also expect more than your fair share of all the nasty, apparently random things that happen to people the world over: getting mugged, having to work hard, getting no sleep, getting sick, suffering chronic pain from old injuries, lacking food and having your transportation fail regularly in spectacular and dangerous ways.

Would that have changed anything? Might a bout of frantic back-peddling have ensued?

In some cases, maybe.

Tuesday, October 08, 2019

The Names of Their Gods

Dr. Jordan Peterson’s fifteen minutes of fame are pretty much up, I suspect, but since he got almost three years of limelight and a book that has sold in the neighborhood of three million copies out of his notoriety, he’s probably not complaining.

For the three readers who have never heard of him, the professor drew international attention in late 2016 for his critique of political correctness, something almost unheard of on Canadian university campuses. He has not looked back since.

Monday, August 06, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (3)

As we have seen repeatedly in the first two installments of this series, the standard Protestant Old Testament is not the only version of the Bible out there. Other versions exist, most of which contain a wider and more varied selection of religious books than our own Bibles.

For Catholics and those in Orthodox churches, no consideration of the relative value of the Apocryphal or Deutero-canonical texts is necessary. Their episcopate takes a position on their behalf and says to them, in effect, “Here’s your Bible.”

Protestants, on the other hand, have no central governing body to decide such issues, and I have yet to come across any local church’s statement of faith that addresses the canonicity or non-canonicity of these “extra” books. Which means it’s up to us to either evaluate them for ourselves, or else opt to put our trust in the folks who made decisions about such things in years past.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

The God Point

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Baiting and Switching

J.T. Wynn’s debut column at Stand to Reason certainly doesn’t waste any time getting around to the really big questions; in this case, What is Truth?

Strictly speaking, I suppose Wynn doesn’t answer the question, but that’s not really the point of his post. In any case, his account of two teachers who conflated truth with perception will definitely ring a bell with recent university or college grads, and with anyone who has watched more than a few minutes of Jordan Peterson on YouTube.

Redefining common words is a useful way to skew an argument, muddle an otherwise simple issue, or advance an agenda. Thus Christians need to be able to identify and counter the ol’ bait-and-switch when we run into it.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Quote of the Day (39)

In his book Do We Need God to be Good? anthropologist C.R. Hallpike quotes mathematician Kevin Devlin:

“Whatever features of our brain enable (some of) us to do mathematics must have been present long before we had any mathematics. Those crucial features, therefore, must have evolved to fulfil some other purpose.”

This sort of statement is incredibly common among evolutionary psychologists and biologists, but “some other [undefined] purpose” is pretty much the best they have to offer the world. The gaping holes in their theoretical framework are orders of magnitude larger than the frame itself, calling their entire dubious intellectual structure into question.

Sunday, May 06, 2018

On the Mount (29)

The so-called Golden Rule is not a new thing.

Infogalactic says, “The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a moral maxim or principle of altruism found in nearly every human culture and religion,” whether in its positive or negative form. From this ubiquity, one might reasonably conclude that the principle is inherently logical, intuitive or fundamental to human society; perhaps all of these.

Thus when the Lord Jesus laid out his own version in the Sermon on the Mount, it seems unlikely his audience had never heard this particular ethical statement — or at least something very much like it — before. History suggests it was a familiar concept.

Thursday, May 03, 2018

The Era of the Gentle and Reverent Lie

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Magination Run Wild

The most recent version of this post is available here.

Saturday, April 07, 2018

Semi-Random Musings (6)

Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, who have attempted to put together possible timelines of Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances to his disciples over the period prior to his ascension.

As anyone who has attempted this will tell you, synthesizing four Gospel accounts and the summary Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 15 is no easy task. There is simply not enough information provided to dogmatize about some of the details. Some calculate 10 appearances, others 12. Most don’t speculate.

One thing nobody can reasonably fail to notice about the appearances is this: however long each may have been, and however many of them there may have been, there is still an awful lot of time unaccounted for in between appearances ... the better part of forty days, in fact.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Five Lessons We Can Learn from Jordan Peterson

In an excellent recent post entitled “Masculinity Without Permission”, Doug Wilson happened to name-check Jordan Peterson as someone who, despite not being a Christian, is actually more biblical on the subject of masculinity than many evangelical elders.

I won’t belabor that point; it’s Doug’s, and he said it better than I can. But I will go him one better: I think there are at least five things I’ve learned from Peterson that it would benefit my fellow evangelicals to consider seriously.

So here goes.

Monday, February 12, 2018

Semi-Random Musings (5)

Last week’s Too Hot to Handle discussion with IC on the subject of collective identity opened a bulging can of worms, and we could hardly avoid leaving a few of those slimy stragglers wriggling around in the bottom of the rowboat.

One such not-entirely-explored issue is the importance of caring for immediate and extended family, a responsibility that in the New Testament is committed to both Christian men and women.

It’s also a responsibility Western governments have in the not-too-distant past assumed on our behalf — not entirely, but extensively.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Right Place, Wrong Way

Christendom is full of people getting to the right place the wrong way.

“Well, that’s a good thing,” we might say. “The important thing is that we get there, right?”

That’s certainly true. Correct conclusions matter. They affect what we do and how we live. But how we arrive at them is often just as important.

In his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Dr. Jordan Peterson gets to a pretty good place by examining dominance hierarchies in lobsters. No, I’m not kidding.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Semi-Random Musings (4)

Dr. Jordan Peterson likes to say the Bible is “hyperlinked”, by which he means something along these lines: that the earlier writings inform the later ones, and the later writings explain the earlier ones. Despite having been written by numerous different authors, it’s one great connected web of spiritual information.

Without giving away everything IC and I expect to discuss this Friday, we’re taking a similar position on the subject of daily Bible reading: it takes all of God’s word to interpret any given portion of it accurately. Bits and pieces here and there will not get the job done.

Other Christians take a different view.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Quote of the Day (36)

If Professor Bret Weinstein is not quite Washington State’s answer to Jordan Peterson, at very least he’s managed to make a bunch of the same enemies by refusing to kow-tow to political correctness on campus, and good for him.

Weinstein is an evolutionary theorist and a professor of biology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia. He and Peterson got together on Joe Rogan’s show recently (ostensibly to discuss Hitler, of all things) in a wide-ranging, almost three hour brainstorm-fest. (Rogan may have an ‘everyman’ sort of appeal, but he too is no intellectual slouch.)

At least part of the three-way exchange might interest other Christians as intensely as it interested me.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

Quote of the Day (35)

Photo: Adam Jacobs, under license
I’ve been promising to transcribe this and fisk it since I first came across it a few weeks ago, so here we go.

Jordan Peterson (for the three remaining people who haven’t heard of him) is a U of T professor who took a lot of flack late last year for adamantly refusing to use the made-up gender pronouns of the transgendered Left with his students. Since then, he’s been all over YouTube, and I’m not surprised. The number of Canadians willing to take a public stand in front of the daunting combo of the State, the State-owned media and the Progressivist lobby for things like morality, tradition or (God forbid) anything even remotely resembling Christian values is, well, microscopic.

The following exchange occurred in the question period after Peterson’s fourth lecture in his Old Testament series, which was NOT about abortion. Not at all.

Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Quote of the Day (34)

The late Christopher Hitchens famously claimed men can be good without God. To prove his case he challenged his detractors to name even one moral action performed by a believer that could not equally have been performed by a nonbeliever.

Hitchens is dead and gone, but his claim is not. Others continue to advance it in different ways. Stefan Molyneux explores the subject in Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics. Dr. Jordan Peterson, notably coy about his belief in the existence of an actual Supreme Being, lays down a rationalistic scenario in a series of recent lectures in which the Bible, though apparently the product of naturally evolving morality rather than divine revelation, still serves a vital purpose in civilizing man, providing an irreplaceable basis for social interaction and transforming the individual.

Goodness without an actual God. Hmm. Does that work for you?

Saturday, June 24, 2017

An Open Letter to Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Dear Dr. Peterson,

I’ve been enjoying immensely your online lecture series on The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories. Hearing you reframe these familiar truths and ancient tropes in the terminology of psychology and mythology — and occasionally in plain secular language, rather than religiously and liturgically — has lit up the OT landscape for me in a new way. As you mentioned in your fourth lecture, a hypothesis that works itself out in human experience on multiple levels is that much more likely to represent the real state of things.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Too Hot to Handle: I Thought It My Way

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: Let me set this up for you, IC.

Dr. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor whose struggle against political correctness we discussed at length here a few weeks ago, gives an extensive interview with two writers for the Winter 2016 edition of C2C Journal about the assault on free speech in Canada.

So one of his interviewers asks him about what it was about his refusal to buckle to the forces of “social justice” at U of T that has set off such a firestorm and his answer is that “There was something I said I wouldn’t do. That took the general and made it specific.”

Friday, November 04, 2016

Too Hot to Handle: Crossing Jordan

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Coming soon in your size and mine
Those of our readers who don’t live in Canada — which will be most of you — may be unfamiliar with the current plight of University of Toronto professor Jordan B. Peterson. Professor Peterson is under the gun — protested by students and censured by his own administration — for refusing to address his students with gender neutral fake pronouns like “zhe”.

Tom: U of T trans studies instructor Nicholas Matte has called on Peterson to “stop abusing students”. But the threat of having to appear before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal doesn’t seem to bother Professor Peterson. He’s drawn a line in the sand: “If they fine me, I won’t pay it. If they put me in jail, I’ll go on a hunger strike. I’m not doing this, and that’s that. I’m not using the words that other people require me to use. Especially if they’re made up by radical left-wing ideologues.”

A tempest in a teapot, Immanuel Can? Or something more serious?