“Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.”
– Jordan B. Peterson, Twelve Rules For Life, p. 107
“We blew the metaphysical foundations out from underneath our culture, and we need to get them back.”
13:30
“There’s always a tension in religions between the dogmatic element and the spiritual element. And conservatives, technically speaking, tend to marshal themselves on the sides of the more rule-oriented and dogmatic elements of the religion, and liberals, roughly speaking, tend to marshal themselves more on the spiritual side. … The dogma is necessary because it conserves the structure, but the spiritual aspect is necessary because it updates the structure.”
19:45
You can never go home again.
I think that’s essentially right – we can never go back to our old home, but we can always build a new one.
I think Peterson is conflating faith and religion. And, maybe that is what he intends here. I have faith in a number of things, many of which are not religious. Goodness is also quite irrelevant for the most part. Foremost is my faith in the existence of the universe, although I don’t have any backing for that belief. The universe, of which my thoughts are part, just seems to be here and I have to deal with it as is. The negation of that belief seems contradictory. Any ideas on how the universe came into existence?
I don’t have any ideas on how the universe came into existence. I tend to assume it has always existed, in some form.