Life's greatest adventure is found in confronting its troubles head-on. By embracing the full extent of life's difficulties without flinching, one can find meaning and justification for the inherent suffering, transforming misery into a profound adventure. This requires a clear purpose and a willingness to engage with challenges.
Dostoevsky's Moral Atheism
Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov,' presents a powerful atheistic argument rooted in the problem of evil, specifically the horrific suffering of innocent children. He questions how a benevolent God could permit such atrocities, even if it served a greater cosmic purpose, thereby challenging the moral foundation of faith.
The Peril of Intellectual Pride
Brilliant intellects, like Ivan Karamazov, are particularly susceptible to the sin of pride, which can lead them astray and cause them to inflict suffering on themselves and others. This pride, proportionate to their intelligence, can result in a downfall that is far more devastating than if they were less intelligent, underscoring the need for humility.
Privilege and Responsibility
Gifts and talents, whether intellectual capacity or other forms of privilege, are unequally distributed. If one is unfairly privileged and fails to use these advantages to benefit others, they risk self-destruction. This implies a moral imperative to leverage one's advantages responsibly, lest they become a source of personal ruin.
Stephen Fry's Moral Outrage
Stephen Fry, despite being an atheist, exhibits profound moral outrage at the suffering of children, shaking his fist at the sky. This emotional response suggests that even in atheism, there's an unconscious engagement with the concept of God and a relationship with a higher moral order, as anger is typically directed at a perceived agent.
Consciousness vs. Materialism
The undeniable reality of consciousness challenges purely materialistic explanations of existence. While science struggles to explain the link between neurological function and subjective experience, consciousness itself is a primary datum. This suggests that consciousness, not just matter, could be fundamental to reality, implying a deeper, relational aspect to existence.
Organisms as Microcosms
Richard Dawkins' concept that every biological organism is a microcosm of its environment, reflecting its surroundings in its very structure, parallels ancient Christian ideas of the soul as a reflection of cosmic order. This suggests that adaptation requires an internal representation of the external world, implying a deep, inherent connection between beings and reality.
Rationalism as Secularized Prayer
The process of generating scientific hypotheses, often shrouded in mystery, can be seen as a form of secularized prayer. Just as prayer involves seeking guidance and understanding from a higher power, hypothesis generation involves an intuitive, often non-linear, process of inquiry driven by compelling questions and a desire for truth.
The Power Illusion
The notion that human motivation is solely driven by power is a cynical and self-serving narrative. While power dynamics are evident in the degeneration of institutions, psychopaths, who exclusively use power strategies, are not dominant due to their inability to cooperate, suggesting a more complex underlying human motivation.
The Biblical Corpus as a Moral Compass
The biblical corpus, far from being archaic, investigates the fundamental principles on which the world is founded and should be founded. These animating stories, like a body of laws, provide a moral framework, answering the question of what sacrifice should be devoted to, which is conceptually equivalent to work.
Work as Sacrifice: A Bargain with the Future
Work is fundamentally the sacrifice of the present for the future, a bargain struck with the spirit of the future. Unlike enjoyment or play, work involves giving up immediate gratification with the understanding that it will be returned manifold. This is the human destiny, necessitated by our awareness of time and the need to plan for our future selves.
Cain and Abel: The Archetypal Conflict
The story of Cain and Abel, a concise 20-sentence narrative, sets the pattern for the eternal battle between good and evil, manifesting as the 'hostile brothers' trope seen in countless myths and stories. It illustrates two fundamental pathways of adaptation and narrative valuation: one leading to acceptance and well-being, the other to resentment and destruction.
Confronting Formless Potential: The Creative Spirit
The biblical creation narrative describes the spirit of God differentiating formless potential ('tohou va-vohu') into manifest structures. This mirrors human consciousness, which confronts a field of potential—whether terrifying chaos or joyful opportunity—and casts it into reality through choices and actions, implying a profound role in shaping our world.
Love as the Ultimate Ordering Principle
Orienting oneself by love, particularly the love for one's children and oneself in the deepest sense, is the highest aim for transforming potential into good order. This love mirrors the divine spirit's action, suggesting that the fundamental ordering principle of reality is one that acts in accordance with the highest dictates of love.
The Hero's Journey: Confronting Chaos
The human spirit's heroic journey involves confronting the terrifying, formless potential of chaos, often symbolized as a serpent or dragon, to bring forth valuable order. This act of confronting predators and taming them, or destroying them, establishes habitable order and is echoed in myths like the dragon and the gold, representing the gain of the valuable through confronting the terrifying.
Truth as the Ultimate Adventure
Telling the truth is presented as the ultimate adventure, requiring one to let go of predetermined outcomes and cast oneself into the unknown, much like sailing on the 'briny deep.' This path, though destabilizing, is exciting and aligns with being made in the image of God—a creative, contending, adventurous spirit infused with love.
Revelation Through Ignorance: The Wasteland Journey
Recognizing one's own ignorance and the insufficiency of tyrannical propositions can lead to a profound revelation, akin to Christ's journey into the desert after baptism. This 'wasteland' period of confusion is the price for letting go of false certainties, but it allows for a reconnection with the creative spirit and a potential turn towards saintliness.
Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
The surge in anti-Semitism, particularly in academia, is rooted in a theological narrative of victim and victimizer, exemplified by Cain. This narrative construes the self as an innocent victim and others, including God, as victimizers. Prosaically, this translates to identifying the successful, especially statistically hyper-successful groups like Jews, as the ultimate victimizers, a hypersimplified and idolatrous rationalization born from idiocy and moral degeneration.
Peterson: Wrestling with God vs. Self
Wrestling with God is distinguished from wrestling with oneself by the aim. If your desire is for what you want right now, you're wrestling with the lowest parts of yourself. Conversely, reorienting yourself and aiming at what is best, even in misery, is an attempt at communion with God. This involves placing yourself in relation to the highest possible aim at every moment, a practice that requires faith and vision, not just reliance on facts.
Peterson: Faith as a Gamble for Meaning
Faith is not a crutch for the fact-averse but a necessary gamble for navigating life's uncertainties, akin to marriage or a new job. When we lack complete knowledge, we stake our souls on our bets, moving forward with faith. This action of faith, assuming we can navigate storms to reach a destination, is essential for making life manifest and avoiding the opposite, especially given our inherent ignorance of the unknown.
The Divine Feminine and the Pieta
The divine feminine is embodied in the archetype of the Pieta, where the Virgin Mary holds her broken son. This represents the highest offering: child and self. A good mother facilitates her child's journey into the world, even at great cost, rather than merely protecting them, which would be destructive. This courageous facilitation is the core of heroic feminine being, leading to the child's redemption and return.
