Biblical Series X: Abraham: Father of Nations

[Music] hello everyone it's been a very strange day so I'm going to tell you about what happened and then I'll start the lecture so I got up this morning and started to put my day together and then I tried to sign into my gmail account and it said that it had been disabled because I violated the terms of service with Gmail and I thought well I didn't violate any Terms of Service that I know of now I set up a new YouTube channel yesterday called Jordan B Peterson clips and so we made some technical changes and so I thought maybe it had something to do with that and I had been shout out of Google one other time years ago so when you get a shout out like that there's a little form you can fill out and so I filled out the form and I said that I had been shut out and that I didn't know why and I sent it off and then I realized one of my staff members called me and said that she was locked out of the YouTube account oh yeah the YouTube account is hooked to the gmail account so that meant that I couldn't get access to any of my youtube videos they were still up and online but I couldn't get access to them I couldn't post last week's biblical lecture for 4 for example and so that was worrisome and made me suspicious and then about two hours later or something like that I got an email from Google and they said that they had reviewed my request to be reinstated and that I had violated Google's Terms of agreement or a Terms of Service and they weren't going to turn my account back on and I thought and they didn't say why they didn't say anything I got there is no warning whatsoever about any of this they didn't tell me why and they didn't say why in the email response and I wrote them back and I said because they said I could I wrote them back and I said this might not be a good idea basically and you might want to think about it and then I twittered tweeted what had happened right I took screenshots and I tweeted and I contacted a whole bunch of journalists because it turns out that I know a whole bunch of journalists and so and so then what happened then was that I got a call from the Daily Caller in the United States I had done an interview with them last week which isn't posted yet and they interviewed me and within 20 minutes posted it online and so they have a fairly big audience and so that was good and then somebody phoned me from Ottawa and I did a live radio show about that and that was good and then a number of other journalists contacted me and I sent them the information but another one of my staff and actually my son emailed me and he said look you should hold off because maybe there's still a mistake here and I thought yeah there might be it might be just a mistake but then why in the world did I email Google and they contacted me and they said they would not reinstate it and they didn't provide me with any information so I contacted the other journalists and I said well you never know maybe this is just a mistake so let's hold off and then well I was about half an hour later while I was trying to get into my I used this AdWords account that's Luke link to Google I don't run ads on my videos but I need the AdWords account because it helps me add some little gadgets to the videos that I wouldn't otherwise be able to and I was I was playing with that the system came back online I thought well that's interesting and lots of people had emailed me and twittered me and some people within Google and some people elsewhere and they were doing whatever they were going to do to help me get all this material back up and running and so something worked my suspicions are that what worked was the publicity now so but maybe not you know and it's very weird being in this situation because there has been a number of recent episodes where these larger companies Facebook Google patreon not that it's a massive company but it's starting to become reasonably significant have decided on rather arbitrary grounds to shut down their users and this is very ominous to me partly because we've we've turned our communications over to very large systems or very large systems have emerged to mediate our communication right I mean there's lots of benefit to it so you don't want to get too cynical about it but we're blind with regards to the policies that regulate the the actions the regulatory actions of these large organizations and that's really a bad thing and something else is even more ominous really ominous you know it's highly probable that we're going to build political algorithms into our artificial intelligence and this sort of thing will be regulated by machines that no one understands and that's a really bad idea and that's a really likely possibility so anyways I was all confused about this I thought Jesus maybe I flew off the handle you know because I was sort of it was stressful man you know because I have like a hundred and fifty thousand emails in that account like that's a lot of emails and it's all my correspondence for the last ten years you know so it's an archive as well as an ongoing email system I have a commercial email system that I just set up three weeks ago with like six different email addresses now to try to organize my correspondence so I wasn't completely unable to communicate but my calendar was gone and that's a bloody disaster because like I've got things scheduled out forever and I don't remember what they are I can't even remember what I'm doing in a day so much less in a month but I thought maybe I flew off the handle and I was worried that I contacted the journalist too soon and you know but anyways it all worked out so then what happened well just as I was coming to this lecture I stepped outside and there was a little package outside and luckily it wasn't a bomb there was a there's a package outside nice little packages and we looked my wife and I looked inside it there was a couple of bottles of wine in there so that was nice and there was a little note and so I'm gonna read you the little note because it's actually pretty interesting so so this person said that they had finally tackled self altering sweets oh they seem to be happy about that but that's not so interesting except peripherally a friend on Twitter has contact with Google engineers she said quote I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help and I did get contacted by quite a few people at Google who said that they had been you know watching my lectures and so on and were happy about what I was doing anyways I spoke with some friends inside Google who offered to help but they suggest he set up a back-up plan the teams are feeling significant pressure from advocacy groups and quote I have at least four Google engineers who offered to speak up on his behalf but they know the team dynamics and unfortunately especially YouTube is an SJW cesspool I hope this information is useful to you it's like yeah it's kind of useful alright so that was that was part of what happened today and so anyways I still don't really understand it right because I don't know why it got shut down and I don't know if anything I did got it turned back on and I don't know the reasons for it and that's also rather ominous it seems to me that when I was thinking it through and was that I know I have a fairly what would you call it respectable YouTube following I don't know if you'd necessarily call it respectable it's fairly large YouTube following and it seems to me that it would have been appropriate for Google if they were going to shut down my account to tell me why I would think and also maybe look me up maybe especially after I emailed them and then maybe not to have emailed me back and said no we're not going to reinstate you but we're not going to tell you any reasons that they didn't say they wouldn't tell me any reasons they just didn't tell me any reasons and then it also seems very strange to me that it just all of a sudden went back on after two hours and so well so I don't know what that may be more information will come to light over the next few days I hope that I didn't jump the gun but it's very a very peculiar set of circumstances I thought it was kind of amusing actually that the video that they stopped me from posting today was the last biblical lecture you wouldn't necessarily think that that would be the sort of thing that people would want to stop from being posted but we're in very very strange times so that was my adventure for today and so I didn't you know I hate speakers who apologize to the crowd before they talk to them because you know if you're speaking to people and they put all this effort into coming then you shouldn't tell them what a sorry and useless creature you are before you talk to them you know and ask for their forbearance and forgiveness it's like it's a little you're a little late for that but I'm still gonna do that a little bit today because you know I wanted to spend all day preparing this lecture I mean I've prepared it a lot before him but that rattled me up a lot and so I didn't prepare as much as I could have anyways we'll stumble forward and see how it goes I I'm I'm I'm reasonably familiar with the stories now and so onward and upward so I'm gonna reiterate this you know I've learned something I have this idea that it would be a good idea for young people and older people citizens of the west let's say to learn more about their culture and their civilization right because it's a great civilization and it's it's it's taken a lot of work to put together but I don't think that we really know you know I know a fair a bit about it although I wouldn't consider myself nearly as educated as a person should be but I'm not too badly educated and but I tell you going through these biblical lectures verse by verse just makes me even more aware of how unbelievably ignorant I am you know and partly for two two reasons like one is because I've been using this Bible hub calm place and I think I told you last week but I wanted to reiterate it because it's important it's so interesting the way that they've set it up because you can go through the biblical stories verse by verse and then for each verse there's a whole small font page of commentary from multiple sources and so you know not only is the Bible hybrid hyperlinked in the way that I discussed in the first lecture with all the verses referring to not all the other verses but lots of them but it's I mean it's got its tendrils out into literature you know direct commentaries on the text but also although all the literature that's been influenced by it so it's it's it's an unbelievably central and core text and it's so interesting to read a book where every sentence has been commented on what really in volumes and then just to get a sense of that volume of material you know how much power brain power there's been put into this and and to also understand how bloody ignorant like I'm so ignorant about this there's all this work and and it seems that we've left it to decay in the dust and it's a big mistake man it's a big mistake because the people who are writing these commentaries like you know a lot of its from the 14th and 15th and 16th century it's kind of archaic and it's and it's some of it's outdated and some of it you wouldn't agree with but if you read all the commentaries side by side you know you get a pretty good blast of wisdom coming at you and like the thing about wisdom is it stops you from running face-first into walls you know it's not just there to to so that you can talk to people at parties about what university you graduated from you know and it's there because the the information is unbelievably useful you know one of the things that I've realized that I want to return to tonight because I've been thinking a lot about this idea of the arc you know and I think I mentioned to you last week that I'd figured out that there is this idea that Noah was perfect in his generations and that meant that he has said his family in order wasn't just him but he had said his family in order and because of that when when the catastrophe came like it comes to everyone he was able to withstand it because he had the support of the people who were near and dear to him and that's really important when things come along to lay you low like if you're alone and the flood comes man goodbye to you if you've got 10 or 15 people supporting you in a tight Network you know and and your your interrelationships with them or pristine and you can tell them the truth and they can tell the truth back to you it's possible that you might be able to find that thin way that will preserve you when when when when you know the terrible things come knocking at your door and so there's this the idea of the ark is very very concrete in Noah it's actually a structure that that he inhabits you know it's a concrete eyes almost like a child's story and and I'm not being cynical about that because there are some bloody brilliant Charles to children's stories but you know it's really concrete eyes but then Abraham comes along and instead of an ark there's a covenant right now it says in the story of Noah that Noah walked with God and and of course Abraham it isn't clear exactly did he's walking with God or before God which we'll get into later but you see I see this as part of the increasing cycle psychologize ation of the sacred ideas that were acted out by archaic people so first of all it's concretize in the form of a ship that actually sustains you when the floods come right it's it's very concrete imagery the sort of thing you might see in a movie but then with Abraham it turns into a psychological covenant in some sense it's like a contractual agreement now it's a country it's a contractual agreement between Abraham and God but but that doesn't really matter that I mean obviously it matters but it's that it's it's only it's only half of what's important about that the other half is that it's a contract and you know one of the things that you do with your ideal let's say is you establish a contract with it you also establish like a social contract with other people right that's what keeps society organized and so there's this idea that emerges in the Abraham stories of a sacred contract and that has the same function as the Ark and what it does because what happens in Abraham we'll see more of this today is that he you know God tells him to go forward into the world and we've we talked about that last week and he does that the encounters famine and the encounters tyranny and he encounters powerful people who want to take from him what is his I mean god sends about world but it's not like he has an easy ride of it it isn't easy at all it's as hard as it can be but there's this consistent emphasis in the text and I think it's something really worth attending to that if you maintain your contract which and that has that has to do with honesty and trust and truth and all of those things if you maintain your contract and you have a good possibility the best possible possibility of making your way through the catastrophe in the chaos and I don't want to be naive about this you know when I read young and I started to understand the idea of the hero archetype you know the idea that the human being is a is a force a logo's force that can stand up against chaos and catastrophe and tragedy and evil and prevail I never did think that that meant that if you did stand up and tell the truth that you would necessarily prevail right it's not it's not it's not a magic trick it's your best bet that's the thing you don't have a better option and so and that's what's that's what that I see the idea is emerging in the Abrahamic texts it's like people are figuring this out that would be progressive revelation that's one way of thinking about it and you can think about that religious terms but you can also think about it as humanity consulting itself right each individual talking to themselves which is what we do when we when we think and each individual communicating with every other individual and gathering a body of wisdom that helps people or orient themselves in the toughest conditions and it's an incremental process and I think that I really do believe that that's speaking purely secularly I do believe that that's what manifests itself in the biblical stories right it's the dawning enlightenment of mankind something like that as we start to understand the principles by which we have to live in order to orient ourselves properly in the world so and I also do believe and this is this is the thing that's the unspoken question is like you don't you don't have any idea how rich and fulfilling your life could be despite its tragedy and limitation if you stop doing the things that you know to be wrong it's a really grand experiment and you know one of the things that God tells Abraham Kahn's as as the story progresses especially every time Abraham makes a sacrifice as God says walk with me and be perfect it's something like that and so the injunction is will aim high establish this relationship with the highest thing that you can conceive of which you might as well do that because well what are you gonna do is to have this relationship with the most mediocre thing you can conceive of or you're gonna establish relationship with the lowest thing you can conceive of people do that and I wouldn't recommend it it's a really bad thing and there's a lot of pain associated with that and maybe you know there's the there's pain that can expand into a world destroying force down that route and there's absolutely no doubt about that so what is there something superstitious and foolish about attempting to establish a contractual relationship with the source of all being I mean I I just don't see that as a as an erroneous conception and you know it's not necessary perhaps to get lost in the details we can argue forever about what God might or might not be but we could at least say that the concept of God is an embodiment of humanity's highest ideal right we could at least agree on that and then you might say well is that real and the first thing I would say about that is there's a lot of things about the world we don't understand and the second thing I would say is it depends bloody well on what you mean by real that's for sure and that turns out to be a very complicated question so okay so we left Abram remember at the end last time he had just gone off to fight a bunch of kings and get his nephew back which seemed to be a pretty courageous act and so that brought a story to an end and it's interesting I think what happens in the narrative is that there's a story so Abraham is somewhere and he goes somewhere else right that's the story and he has adventures along the way and those adventures are usually the typical kind of adventure which is a riff in the structure of the story and exposure to a kind of chaos and novelty and then a reconstitution of the of the mode of being so that's it's a classic story right you are somewhere you're a certain way you're moving forward something happens that you don't expect it blows you into pieces it introduces chaos right you you face the drag and you get the gold or maybe the bloody thing eats you and the story is over and then and then you get to where you're going but then the question is well what happens when you get to where you're going and that's a really important issue because one of the things that happens to people all the time in their life is that they get to where they're going and then they don't know what to do right so for example you graduate from university it's like okay story over who are you now who are you the next day and so so what happens is when you succeed then there's a success crisis and the success crisis is well I've run this story to its end now what and that's exactly what happens in in the Abrahamic stories and they're punctuated by a period of contemplation and sacrifice so every time an Abrahamic story comes to its end then Abraham makes another sacrifice and communes with God and then he figures out what to do next and that seems that seems right it seems psychologically right because what you should do when your story comes to an end when you've achieved what it is that you want to achieve or perhaps when you're in terribly dire straits but we won't talk about that at the moment when you've achieved what you need to achieve then the next question is okay well now I'm that person or I have that character what what do I need to do next and some of that is always well what do I need to give up now what do I need to let go of so I can move to the next plateau right assume that your life is a hopefully a sequence of upward moving what would you call them it's like Sisyphus except you're actually each time you climb up the mountain you get a little higher on the mountain that's something like that so it's Sisyphus with an optimistic bent and and and maybe if you push the rock up the mountain properly and let it roll down then and if you do that right then it's okay every time you roll it back up it's it's better in some sense I don't think that's unrealistic either and so well Abraham goes and rescues his nephew from these two tyrannical kings that's very brave and he doesn't take any reward for it because his he's concerned it's just a manifestation of the right thing and then he has another vision after these things that's the battle the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision saying fear not Abram I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward and Abram said Lord God what will I'll give me seeing I go childless and the steward of my house is this Alysia of Damascus and Abram said Behold to me thou has given no seed and lo no one born what one born in my house is mine heir and behold the word of the Lord came to him saying this shall not be thine heir but he that shall come forth out of the own tyne own bowels shall be done here and he brought him forth abroad and he said now look to heaven and tell the stars if you're able to number them number them and he said unto Him so shall thy seed be and Abram believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for righteousness and he said unto him I'm the Lord that brought thee out of ur of the Chaldees to give this land to you to inherit it and he said Lord God whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it and then he does this sacrifice take me in effort a heifer of three years old and a she-goat and a Rabb and a Turtledove and a young pigeon and then God comes down and well Abraham goes into a trance that's what it appears to be in the story and has a great terror and then God appears to him and I'll just review this commentary again this is from Joseph Benson and when the Sun was going down that's about the time when you wash up for the evening and he's he's praying and waiting towards evening a deep sleep fell upon Abraham not a common sleep through weariness or carelessness but a divine ecstasy that being wholly taken off from things sensible he might be wholly taken up with a contemplation of things spiritual very strange very very strange series of interpretations because it does seem that what happens to Abraham that he falls into some sort of revelatory trance and so when as I've taken some pains to explain we don't really understand such things and and we can't rule out their existence because there's too much evidence that they do in fact occur perhaps it's a technology that we no longer possess that's one possibility perhaps we no longer know how access these sorts of states of consciousness it's certainly possible and lo a horror of great darkness fell upon him this was designed to strike upon the spirit of Abram and to possess him with holy reverence holy fear prepares the soul for holy joy God humbles first and then lifts lifts up yeah well I think that's right too like you know one of the experiences I've had in my life fairly commonly in their variety of different ways this is especially true when I was paying a lot of attention to my dreams which I did for about 15 years I guess something like that now and then I would feel like I'd learned some things and had sort of consolidated them and then before I went to sleep I'd think okay I'm ready to learn something else it's like and I didn't say that without trepidation and usually because usually when you learn something you know it's not that Pleasant because you usually learn something about why you're wrong and the deeper the thing that you learned the more you learn about why you're wrong and there's a death that's associated with that because then you have to let that part of you that's wrong die and that's that's real that's the sacrifice right and so you have to make a sacrifice you have to be willing to make a sacrifice before you're going to learn something and the and perhaps your what you'll learn is in proportion to your willingness to make a sacrifice and I really do believe that I do believe that as well because I also think that if you commit to something that means that you don't do a bunch of other things right and so that's the sacrifice of all those other things you commit to it you set your sights on it if you really commit to it and you get the sacrifice right so to speak then the probability that that thing will be successful vastly increases and I think that that's also not a naive or or a naive way of thinking or a foolish way of thinking I my experience has been that that's the case and so back to the dream I mean I do think that we learn in trepidation and that most of the time if if you have to be laid low before the new revelation can make itself manifest and I think that's also what happens to people often in psychedelic experiences when they have a bad trip they don't get through the bad part of it and maybe that's because there's so much mess in their lives now I'm speculating but it's informed speculation there's so much mess in their lives that the altered state of consciousness makes manifest that it's like a little trip through hell and but the mess is so complete and comprehensive and all-pervading that there's no way they can get through it now if they could get through it and started to sort those things out then you know there would be perhaps what would you call it a compensatory positive revelation at the end but the first thing is if you want to learn something is that you're going to encounter well you have to figure out what's wrong before you you can figure out what wisdom you need next to guide yourself and that's no laughing matter right and so I think that that's what the that's what this refers to I think that's the sort of psychological experience that that refers to I also think we built this a little bit into this into the future authoring program you know I read this really cool paper once reviewed by this guy named Jeffrey gray Jeffrey gray wrote a book called the neural psychology of anxiety man and that is a great book it is impossible to read it took me really it took me like six months to read it and the reason for that is that he reviewed about 3,000 papers and they're all neurological papers and and and heavy psychological / biological papers he actually read them all and he understood them and he synthesized them and then he wrote this book about the synthesis and so and he's very very careful with this terminology and so to read the book you have to understand brain anatomy and you have to understand neural neural pharmacology and you have to end understand animal behavior the whole literature on animal behavior not whole whopping dose of human psychology and cybernetics it's like it's a vicious book but you really learn something when you read it if you go through it it by bit like it's it's it's had an overwhelming influence on psychology even among people who haven't read it which is most of the people who cite it by the way and so but he said he outlined this real cool study maybe it was a sequence of is about how to motivate rats you know and rats are a lot like us you know in positive and negative ways and you know biochemically and and psycho pharmacologically they're very very similar and they have very complex social environments and you know they have hierarchies and they play and they laugh Jack panksepp Jaak panksepp found out that routes laugh if you tickle them you can tickle them with like the end of a pencil eraser but you can't hear them laughing because they laugh ultrasonically like bats so you have to record it and then slow it down then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle em so so which is you know you think oh you know spend $50,000 on a study demonstrating that rats laugh and you think well wait a second wait a second that's a major-league study you know because he's outlined a ludic circuit that's a play circuit and yock banks have discovered the play circuited mammals that's a bloody big deal you know if you get that by like rubbing rats with a pencil eraser well good for you so anyways so Great Auk Talaat about how to motivate a a rat and you might have heard about BF Skinner you know he used food pellets to motivate his rats but what you don't know about Skinner is that those rats were starved to three-quarters of their normal body weight so they would they would work for food and so Skinner's routes were kind of oversimplified but you can get rats to work for food they don't have to be that hungry you can get them to work for food and they'll do all sorts of things they'll press levers and and they'll open our open doors and they'll solve problems and you know they'll do all sorts of things and one of the things you can do to kind of measure how much the rat is motivated is let's say you've read him through a maze and he knows there's some food at the end of the maze you can tie a little spring to his tail and see how hard he pulls when you open the door to the maze so that's because that's how much rat work the route is willing to do so you can measure that or you can see how fast these skitters down the maze and you can get an estimate about the rats motivation and so then you might say well how motivated is a hungry rat and the answer would be depends on how hungry is but there's another answer it also depends on what's chasing him when he's going after the food so if you have a rat and you you have food over here and you often some cat odor rats hate cat odor and it's innate they never have to see or smell a cat to be absolutely petrified by cat odor and so if you walked in some cat odor and then open the door that rat will zoom to that food a lot faster than it will if it's just hungry so a rat running away from something that it doesn't want towards something that it does want is a very motivated rat and so one of the things we did with the future authoring program that's germane to this idea of terror because there's a business idea in the old testament the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and it's a pretty harsh idea but but there's something really useful about it because one of the things you see with people all the time is that they're maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal as poorly defined as it might be but then they're afraid right they're afraid about what they might encounter and that stops them because fear does stop people it freezes you like a prey animal and so people move ahead but then they get afraid and then they start moving ahead and so and that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator so we're more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion quantitatively speaking quantitative quantitatively speaking you can measure that and that's I think because we can only be so happy but we can really be suffering and yet you know so we have to pay more attention to the negative and that's bad because the negative can stop you and then in my clinical practice you know I often talk to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision and and they are weighing out the costs and the benefits of making the life decision you know and one of the things I always talk to them about is wait a second that's an incomplete analysis you have to weigh out the benefits and the costs of doing this and you have to weigh out the costs and benefits of not doing that not doing it and that's not the same as the zero that you assume that you're starting with right because to not make a decision it also has a cost and sometimes the cost of not making a decision is far worse than the cost of making a decision even if the decision is risky and so one of the things you can derive from that and this is very useful I think is that this is also I think why it's so useful to contemplate your mortality so to speak as you're screwed no matter what you do you know and that actually frees you is that you you you have power fade that has catastrophes and you have path B that has catastrophes and you don't get to have the no catastrophe path but you get to pick which one and that's really something because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do then you can afford to take some risks because you're not you know this is all within the arc metaphor I'm still making the case that despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic you can you can make a covenant with the highest ideal and that will take you through it the best way possible and I'm still making that case so so then you think okay while I'm trying to make this decision I'm gonna go try to do something difficult and isn't that terrifying and then you think yeah but wait a minute what's really terrifying is not doing it and then you think about the cost of not doing it so in the future authoring program we have people do this little meditative exercise which is okay just think about your insufficiencies by your own definition right the way that you don't do what you know you should do about the things that you do that you shouldn't do that you know you shouldn't do beyond a shadow of a doubt right there's some things like that and that that's bad habits and poor aim and all of the resentment and hatred and aggression and unresolved conflicts and all those things that are demanding you and warping you and then think okay those things get the upper hand man they get the upper hand and they take you the worst possible place you could go in the next three to five years what exactly does that look like and so you sketch all that out and you think hey I don't want to go there and so the next time that a temptation comes up you think well I'd be a lot better for me if I didn't succumb to this temptation it's like that's kind of weak eh you'd look a little better if you didn't eat like a cheesecake a day or something like that you know that's that's something but it's not the same as I'm gonna have diabeetus and I'm gonna lose my damn leg in in in five years if I don't get my eating under control that's motivating and so then the temptation comes along and you think oh how about no seriously how about no not just because a higher good would be obtained if I avoided it but because a terrible catastrophe would be averted if I didn't and so well so you want to get your fear behind you right you want to get it behind you where it's pushing you forward instead of in front of you where it's stopping you and you get your fear behind you pushing your for you forward by actually thinking through the consequences of not putting your life together and the least of those is that you waste it and suffer right because you can suffer anyways man so you waste it and suffer that's a bad deal because maybe if you're gonna suffer you could at least do something noble and glorious and upright and powerful and honorable and admirable and helpful and difficult you know that's just so much better and maybe that's good enough so that you think hey you know little suffering it's basically worth it at least it's up WayForward you know at least it's a way forward and he said unto Abram know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in the land that is not theirs and shall serve those people and nail flicked them for four hundred years go ahead he's hedging his bets here a lot right he says to Abraham well go out you know into the world and then he confronts him with a famine and he confronts him with the tyranny and with powerful people he wants to take his wife and then he loses his nephew and who he has a fight with many has to go fight a war and now he you know he's reconstituting this covenant god says yeah you're gonna have mmm a nation is going to come from you but they're gonna be slaves to tyrants for like four hundred years is it's like he's not the great salesman exactly but but the thing about it is that the thing that I like about it is that it's realistic you know and you ought to think too because who knows why it is that the Bible exists or why people wrote it but you know if they're gonna sell you something I don't know if this is the way to do it you know because unless you're a Salesman who's sophisticated beyond belief because you'd think that if it was just a matter of controlling the masses let's say which is once a Marxist interpretation of religion or or providing people with a primitive defense against death anxiety which is essentially the Freudian interpretation that you'd kind of make the deals that God cut with Abraham a little more on the positive and polished side instead of making them a realistic offer constantly like they are that that's also that that that's part of the reason I think it is reasonable to treat the Bible as literature it's it's more than literature it's something other than literature but you can treat it as literature and I think the reason that you can treat it as literature is because the characters are all complex including the character of God Himself is complex and sophisticated it's not one-sided and it's it's paradoxical and incomprehensible at times but I think good literature is like that because you know true art here's something about true art this is something I learned from young it's so smart he was so smart so he imagined that you inhabit the land that you know conceptually and practically and then imagine outside of that there's that massive space of things that you don't know and even outside of that there's the space of things that no one knows right so it's the known territory surrounded by the unknown that's the canonical archetypal landscape and the unknown manifests itself to you and that's where new knowledge comes from but the question is how is that knowledge generated and it doesn't just leap from completely unknown to completely articulate it in one move that isn't how it happens it has to pass through stages of analysis before it becomes articulable and the first stage of analysis as far as I can tell is that you act it out so if something really surprises you the first way that you react to it your category is actually embodied too you'd like this that that's your first category it's not conceptual at all it's embodied and then maybe you start to it like you're at home at night and you know something startled seeing you freeze and then it's dark and then your imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise and that's the sequence it's like embodied response imaginative representation exploration articulation that's how information moves from the unknown to the known and an artists are the people who stand on that imagistic frontier and they and they put themselves out into the unknown and they and they they take a piece of it and they and they transform it into some mythological image and they don't know what they're doing exactly because they're guided by their intuition if they're real artists otherwise they're just propagandists they have to be contending with something they don't understand and what they do is they make it more understandable you know and and then people gaze at those artworks or the or they listen to the stories and then they start to become informed by them but they don't know how or why I was at the Modern Art Museum Museum of Art in New York I'm afraid I don't remember which one unfortunately but I was in this amazing room you know it had all these priceless paintings from the from the late Renaissance hanging in it you know each painting worth who knows a billion dollars maybe they're priceless bathing so the room was it's a shrine and it was full of people from all over the world who are looking at these paintings you think well what the hell are these people doing coming to this room looking at these paintings look whatever what are they up to one of them was a painting of the Assumption of Mary right brilliantly composed and there rose all these people looking at it and I thought what are they doing they don't know what that means like why are they looking at that painting why is it in this room why does it cost a billion dollars why is that painting worth so much and the answer to that is well we don't really know like it happened there are there sacred objects in some sense and we gaze at them in ignorance and wonder and the reason for that is that the unknown shines through the Madison in partially articulated form and so well that's the role of art and that's the role of artists you know real artists real artists are contending with unknown right and they're possessed by it they have a personality trait openness that makes them do that they can't even help it and I've had lots of creative people in my clinical practice so they can tell you the worst thing for creative people is to not be creative because they just die and it because it's it's it's it's like maybe you're a tree with a few major branches you know that's your personality so if you're extroverted man you can't be cut off from people because you just wither and if you're agreeable you have to be in an intimate relationship or you die you know if you're conscientious man and you get and you're unemployed you're just gonna eat yourself up because you have to have a duty and you have to carry a load because you just can't stand it otherwise and open people have to be creative they have to be because otherwise they die they don't have any vitality and so they're cursed with the necessity of putting a foot out into the unknown and making sense of it and then they're also cursed necessity of trying to make a living while they're doing that which they can't because you can't it's almost impossible to monetize creative creative action as many of you who are creative will no doubt find out it's very very frustrating it's not that creative action is were without value right because the creative people are entrepreneurs and the creative people revitalize cities and the creative people make things magnificent and beautiful you think about what's happened in Europe over the last thousand years say two thousand years this amazing unbelievable collaboration to make things so beautiful that they're they're jaw-dropping when you walk into them and you think about the economic value of that right I mean I think it's it's either France or Spain that's the most visited country in the world it's one of those two I think there's more tourists in France than there are people most of the time and part of the reason for that is it's just so damn beautiful you just can't stand it and you think what's the economic value of that it's absolutely incalculable and what's interesting too is that you build that beauty in and then the farther away you get from it in time the more valuable it becomes right instead of decaying it has exactly the opposite it's value magnifies and one of the things that I'm deeply ashamed of as a Canadian is that our sense of beauty is so underdeveloped we're so primitive it's not even primitive that's the wrong word because you know I don't what it is it's it's it's second rate it's second rate at least it's terrorto because people are afraid of beauty but the idea that art is the conservatives really have a problem with this in particular because conservative people tend not to be that creative and it's a misty restaurant it's a mystery to me because they should be concerned with economic development and beauty is so unbelievably crucial to economic development it just yells out at you you know so anyway so that's what artists are doing and so one of the things I would say is buy a damn piece of art you know find one that really speaks to you and and buy a piece of art because you invite that into your life and it's it's a look-out if you do it if it's a real piece of art because you'll also get a you know a little introduction to the artist and then that'll seep into your life and that'll change things like mad but it's really it's unbelievably worth it because it it opens your eyes to the domain of the transcendent that's the right way of thinking about a real piece of art is a window into the transcendent that's what it is and you need that in your life because you're finite and limited and bounded right by your ignorance and your lack of knowing and unless you can make a connection to the transcendent then you don't have the strength to prevail and that's part of the Covenant that's part of the covenant with God and you can see that because you look at these magnificent cathedrals that our civilization built over the centuries you know some of those they're still building this Sangre de Familia in in in Barcelona right and it's an amazing building I think it's gonna take them like 300 years to build that you know people in the Middle Ages they'd start building a cathedral and they think yeah we'll be done this in 300 years you know you imagine the vision that it took to invest in something like that we look at quarterly reports we can't think 300 years into the future to build something of that kind of remarkable remarkable what those cathedrals are so they're they're perfect they're trees first right they're a forest right the Gothic cathedrals there they were forced and the sun is shining through the branches that's the stained glass and they're the perfect balance of light and structure because they're representing something about the proper structure of being which is something like the proper balance between light and structure and and they represent like the sacred tragedy of mankind that's why they're in the shape of a cross and they're open to the sky that's why they have a dome and they're full of gold so that glitters because that's like the City of God you know and and and you you can see that that integral to to our culture is the idea that beauty is one pathway towards God and it's in its saying if you can't find another pathway then why don't use beauty I sure most of you do that with music because music is the one thing that modern people can't be cynical about thank God for that and being fascinated by music because of that it it speaks meaning to people right even nihilistic punk rockers are so damn engaged with their music that they can hardly stand it and you can knock on them and say look you know you're having a transcendent religious experience and they'll just tell you to [ __ ] off because that's [Applause] cuz that's that's what punk rock yourself to do but but that's still what's happening you know I mean it's still what's happening so okay so okay so I got into all that because I was talking about about the Bible as literature you know and and and trying to and trying to lay out because we need in our culture to justify the arts and you have to I don't want to do that by talking about high culture talking about something abstract and evanescent that's the wrong way to go about it this is vital you know like one of the things that's really interesting about the University of Toronto is that the the one side of the campus where we are is beautiful medieval cathedral and the other side is god-awful factory and you know and and that and the thing is the attitude towards knowledge has paralleled that architectural transformation you know at one point the humanities let's say we're a sacred endeavor and and so was the art of being educated in the university and that's turned into like mass factory and that's reflected in the architecture this isn't accidental none of this happens none of this happens by random chance you know it's not like there's a conspiracy or anything because there isn't but that doesn't mean that these things aren't tangled together and the loss of beauty in the universities is a catastrophe because without that beauty there's no call to higher being you know you this is also why I've mentioned to people that they should clean up their rooms that's become quite the internet meme but I'm really serious about it because it's really hard to do that and I've been cleaning up my room by the way for about four months now because my life was thrown into such a catastrophe and and also we were renovating and so but it isn't just that you clean it up you also make it beautiful and beauty hard to make something beautiful and it's really worthwhile and what's really cool is if you learn to make something beautiful even one thing if you can just make one thing in your life beautiful then you've established a relationship with beauty and then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty out into into the world like into other elements of your life and that is so worthwhile it's just incredibly crazily worthwhile and that's an invitation to the divine you know you have to be daring to do that and people are terrified of it people are terrified of color they paint their walls beige they're terrified of art they buy some mass-produced thing because they don't want anybody laughing at them for their lack of taste and they would get laughed at because they have no taste but you have to well that's right because what do you know right you have to develop it and so you're gonna stumble along and make mistakes to begin with and you're gonna show yourself because if you buy who I I think this is pretty and you know somebody comes over he goes hey what's up with you it's kind of hard on yourself esteem but but it's a stunt you're stumbling towards the right you're stumbling towards the kingdom of God that's what you're stumbling towards when you try to make an aesthetic decision and to put something in your life that's beautiful and it's unbelievably worthwhile to do that and you have to steer clear of the frauds and the con artists and all of that and art is full of that of course because it's difficult to distinguish between the real thing and the fraud but but it's unbelievably worthwhile and so back to literature I'm telling you this partly because I've been thinking a lot about the humanities and the arts and practically speaking because I know that artistic types are also entrepreneurial types they're the same personality types and so it's very much worthwhile to make an economic and practical case for this sort of thing you study literature in the humanities so that you can familiarize yourself with the wisdom of our civilization man you should do that because people have been working on this thing for a long time and it's rich beyond comparison so why wouldn't you do that and you teach yourself to to read and you teach yourself to speak and you teach yourself to think and you teach yourself to communicate and I can tell you if you can read and think and communicate you are absolutely 100% unstoppable and that's another thing that's so interesting about humanities education that's at the core of the university it's like there's nothing more economically valuable than teaching people how to articulate themselves and communicate because they can identify problems they can formulate solutions they can negotiate to consensus they they can negotiate on their own behalf on the behalf of others it's like absolutely no downside to it except that there's a responsibility that goes along with it but it doesn't matter because there's no escape from responsibility you can either take it voluntarily or you can take it involuntarily those are your options but there aren't any other options and so we need to understand the role of art and literature and and stop thinking about it as an option it's not an option it's not an option what is it said man does not live by bread alone that's exactly right we live by beauty we live by literature we live by art and literally not metaphorically we cannot live without it because life is too dismal and and and tragic in the absence of the sublime so and ourselves we have to be sharp so that we can survive properly and orient the world properly and not destroy things including ourselves and so and so back to the Bible which I do think is a reasonable it's reasonably construed as a piece of literature because it's deep and because the people who wrote it had at least one foot in the unknowable and they're trying to communicate what they experienced in the unknowable to make it known and that's partly what we're trying to do in this series and what you're trying to do while you're listening and all of that and so good for that and also that nation whom they shall serve I will judge and afterward they'll come out with great substance there'll be a period of tyranny you know and there's a psychological truth to that too one of the things I learned from reading Nietzsche because you can learn a lot from reading Nietzsche that's for sure he he talked about the Catholic Church you know Nietzsche is often construed as a great critic of Christianity and and he certainly was but he was no casual critic in fact I think he was this sort of critic that you'd like to have as a friend because he was the sort of critic that said well here's the great things you've done and that you could keep doing but here's a bunch of really neat things that you did that you really should stop doing and he talked about the Catholic Church and he said what the Catholic Church had done to the European mind in particular was discipline it so that over a period of a thousand years thirteen hundred years fourteen hundred years there was this rule that there was a conceptual structure within which you had to interpret everything and what that did was turn the European educated you European mind into a systematizing cognitive entity and that once that systematizing cognitive entity had been established then it could free itself from those underlying disciplinary structures and go off and do such things as produced the Scientific Revolution for example which required incredible systematic thinking and so Nietzsche had this really interesting idea about freedom and he believed that slavery was an intermediary between the undeveloped individual and the free individual that you had to you had to submit yourself to some intense disciplinary process for some period of time in your life before you could develop any true freedom and so you think maybe you want to learn to play the piano it's like that's not gonna be any fun for a really long period of time right because you're really bad at it and there's a million things you have to memorize and you have to stumble around like a well like an amateur and the same thing happens when kids learn how to read and some of them never get past that point and they never get to the point where they can enjoy reading but in order to put yourself together you have to put yourself in a vise and allow yourself to be constricted and mangled even by the the thing that enslaves you but the goal should be that as a consequence of submitting to the discipline that you become disciplined and then once you become disciplined you can emerge from the disciplinary structure as someone who is free and that's something that's very much worth thinking about as well so that's Illustrated conceptually in this in this piece of literature let's say because what what the psychological meaning of what God tells Abraham is that all people all people are subject and I mean not equally obviously all people are subject to the tyranny that precedes freedom and that that ideas is repeated over and over in the old testament it comes out most particularly in the story of moses right because of course that's the story of movement from tyranny where do you go from a tyranny it's an absolute catastrophe you go from materi into the desert you know where you starve that's harsh that's what happens in the in the story of Exodus and so that's so interesting too because what it means is that sometimes if you're going to move uphill the first thing that happens is you move down hill a lot and so if you want to escape from the straights that bind you now you're not going to move forward and go up you're gonna move forward and go down and that's another reason this is also something that you talked about a lot is that you know on the road to enlightenment you encounter all the things that you don't want to encounter first like all the weaknesses of yourself all the realizations of the tyranny of the world and the catastrophe of nature and all of that and so you step out of your encapsulation you're ignorant encapsulation and its immediate plummet into something that's a desert let's say where everything is chaotic and where you're wandering around without direction a real catastrophe so it's you know because one of the things you might ask yourself is that if enlightenment is possible then why aren't people enlightened because if it was just a matter of going from a good place to a better place it's like well man let's just get at it it's no it's no problem right why would we ever stop doing that but it seems not to be that it's that you're here and that's not good and it's unstable and you step out of it it's like down down to where you don't want to be and you have to contend with that and then maybe you can start your struggle upward and so ever how God is telling Abraham this and he's also telling him that it's okay it's rough though and now and now shall go to thy fathers in peace thou shalt be buried in a good old age but in the fourth generation they shall come hither again that's the Israelites the descendants of Abraham for the iniquity of the amorite says not yet full God is going to leave the tyrants alone until they've manifested their fold here any for reasons that we don't fully understand and it came to pass that when the Sun went down it was dark behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces all Albert Barnes said the oven of smoke and lamp aflame symbolized the smoke of destruction which we've already talked about this catastrophe of of the initial stages and the light of salvation they're passing through the pieces of the victims and probably consuming them as an accepted sacrifice or the ratification of the Covenant on the part of God as the dividing and presenting of them were on the part of Abram in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying unto thy seed I've given this land from the river of Egypt to the great river euphrates now sarai abram's wife bear him no children and she had a handmaid an Egyptian whose name was Hagar so this is a big catastrophe for Abraham especially in those times and perhaps now as much although perhaps people aren't as conscious of it as they once were I mean for Abraham without a biological son there was no there was no there was no vision forward into the future you know and I mean we don't really know what sort of time span over which these archaic people thought but the medieval people we already said could think 300 years into the future without without batting an eye and these people who were who were concerned about their descendants were obviously thinking about existence in a way that wasn't just focused on their immediate existence right they were thinking about well their children in the grandchildren maybe their great-grandchildren maybe the whole society that that stemmed out from them and that's that's smart you know one of the things I learned from Piaget at least in part was that his idea of the equilibrated state which he thought about as partly part of the biological basis of the idea of moral progress it's something like that he was a very very smart Piaget and we said that the the proper equilibrated state is one where imagine you have a family you've got five people in it and you're doing what you want and you're in your family what's good for you but you're doing it in such a way so that the other four members of your family agree with what you do and that it also facilitates them doing what they want and what they should be doing and so it's a really tricky arrangement because it isn't just for you it's for you in a way that's for them and you could also see that that would be something that would be a multiplier right because if you have everyone working voluntarily towards the same common goal then you get a multiplying effect of that and then you might think well it's not just you and your family it's you and your family today and next week in next month next year and ten years from now so you have to take the time span into account and then it should be you and your family in a way that works well in society and then it should work well now and next week and next year and into the future it should be iterative all right that's like sustainability at something like the idea of sustainability and that's that's I would say that's a reasonable way of conceptualizing the holy city it's it's something like that you know if you're trying to make it concrete it's like how should you live your life well let's say you live your life in a manner that justifies its limitation and tragedy that's a good start but then let's say that it does that in a way that also reduces the limitations and suffering of the people that you interact with and now and into the future well maybe there's a way to do that I mean a good negotiation does that right because if you're negotiating with someone like your wife for example what you want is for her to agree with the negotiation and one of the things that Piaget said which I think was brilliant brilliant he said if you take an equilibrated system a family let's say and a dis equilibrate it system so that would be one way or let's say the father is a tyrant and everyone is operating under his whip and you put them in a head-to-head competition the equilibrated system will out-compete the disequilibrium system because the enforcement cost is such that it will slow the system down you know because you'll get resistances from the people inside the system they'll work in the system we'll be working at counter purposes to itself plus there's enforcement costs and so a tyranny cannot beat an elaborated system and I was really excited to encounter that idea because when I encountered it I was also trying to figure out if there was some quantitative difference between the system say of the Soviet Union and Maoist China and the systems of the West apart from just you know arbitrary world interpretation as the postmodern nihilists might have it if there was something fundamental at stake in the terrible Cold War that we fought or it was just a matter of opinion you know when the PIA jetty intake was that well roughly speaking is that the West was an equilibrated system no I'm perfectly equilibrated but reasonably equilibrate in that people were essentially even if they were slaves to some degree they were at least voluntary slaves instead of involuntary slaves and that that was better the system was actually technically better and not just as a matter of interpretation so that's a lovely thing to know and I think it's a really really solid really really solid idea I haven't been able to you know put crowbars under that idea and lift it up I think it's a good one so now sarai abram's wife bear him no children so okay back to children muscle one of what one of the things that's worth thinking about with regards to reading these old stories because we're so not we're very arrogant modern people i we look at these old stories and you think hey we've transcended all that superstition it's like don't be so bloody sure about that these people weren't stupid and so there's there are ways that they viewed the world that we don't have anymore and one of them seems to be this concern for descendants because that just isn't part of our way of thinking we have a very short-term way of thinking maybe it's it's not even one lifetime long it's certainly not multiple lifetimes long and it isn't clear to me at all that that's for the best and you know the the constant complaint that the environmentalists generate some of which is justified in some of which is just anti-capitalist anti-patriotic nonsense that should be cleared out of that entire conversation is that we need to take a longer view and consider more things in our purview when we act and like that fair enough like do we really want a notion that has nothing in it but jellyfish because that's really what we're doing and we're doing it very very rapidly and the data on that are very clear and so you know when you lift up your eyes and you make a connection with something that's transcendent then that should bring more of the world within your purview and and maybe that's concern for the endless number of descendants that you might have might think - well you know if you're a successful person if you have a successful family god only knows how many people you will be the father of right it's completely because you're a nexus right all sorts of things have come together in the cosmos to produce you and then all things sorts of things manifest themselves from you you have no idea what your potential the potential consequences of your actions might be as they cascade across time right you have no idea and so Abraham at least is concerned with these sorts of things and God seems to be concerned too because he promises Abraham that if he maintains the covenant that the most important things that he needs will come to him and they're pretty serious about this so Sarai talks to Abram she's not very happy about the fact that she can't have children she says behold now the LORD hath restrained me from bearing I pray they go in unto my maid it may be that I obtain children by her and Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai well that's not a very trivial thing I wouldn't think I don't imagine that that Sarah was sir I was very happy about turning her maid over to her husband and potentially being usurped in the whole childbearing in the whole childbearing process not in the least but you know so it's also a major sacrifice on Sarai's part there's no doubt about that and of course it's very difficult for us to talk about the ethics of the fact that Hagar was a more or less involuntary participant in this but that was the times absolutely the case and of course slavery and indentured servitude is the way of mankind except in very very very very limited circumstances Carl Jung had something to say about that to which I really liked he said that part of the reason that modern people have it's not the only reason there's the Industrial Revolution obviously but part of the reason that modern people have been able to escape from the catastrophe of tyranny and slavery is because we've agreed to make ourselves our own slaves right so instead of owning a slave you own yourself in a sense and so you trot yourself off to work and exploit yourself so that you can stay alive and maybe it's not something that you want to do but you've taken on the role of slave in some sense in relationship to your own survival instead of forcing someone else to do it which is also something I think that's very noble about the West is that we're willing to enslave ourselves as individuals and we're not we're not doing that to other people no we're doing it to some degree obviously because the society is imperfect but that's something that's very much worth thinking about so Ann Abram hearkened to the voice of Saroyan and Sarai Abrams wife took Hagar her made the Egyptian after Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan and gave her to her husband Abram to be his wife that's the other thing that been so interesting about doing this one of the other things about doing this biblical series and it's one of the things that's so cool about Google despite the fact that they cut off my account you can find any piece of art that ever existed on Google and so that's great so you know when I'm trying to illustrate these these lectures I type in Abraham Renaissance and then like I get 200 Renaissance paintings it's so great and then I can look at them and one of the other things that's so remarkable is that all of these the major themes of these stories have been illustrated by people of spectacular mind mind expanding talent you know there's just this endless array of well look at that I mean that's an amazing painting and so and there's and and of this there's there's dozens of paintings on this theme and it's just another indication of how obsessed people you know this was the only book that existed for years and people were absolutely obsessed by it and produced all these amazing things from it and we're in danger of losing that and that's a big mistake because it's magnificent a little humility would go a long way towards restoring it and he went in done unto Hagar and she conceived and when she saw that she had conceived her mistress was despised in her eyes so I Hagar was successful and like that was a hallmark of feminine success now and certainly then and so she started to lord it over Sarai which seemed a little bit on the ungrateful side I would say because Sarai made a big sacrifice to allow Hagar to become Abraham's wife and so a little bit of gratitude would have been an order I suppose at least that's how the story goes and Sarai said unto Abram my wrong be upon thee I have given my maid into thy bosom and when she saw that she had conceived I was despised in her eyes the Lord judge between you and I and Abraham said unto Sarai behold thy maid is in thine hand do to her as it pleases you and when Sarai dealt hardly with her Hagar fled from her face and the angel of the Lord found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness by the fountain in the way - sure and he said Hagar Sarai's maid whence camest thou and whither wilt thou go and she said I flee from the face of my mistress right and the angel of the Lord said returned to thy mistress and submit under her hands and the angel said I will multiply your seed exceedingly and shall not be numbered for multitude and the angel said behold thou art with child and thou shalt thou shalt bear a son and shalt shall call his name Ishmael and Ishmael means God here's by the way because the LORD hath heard thy affliction and he'll be a wild man his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him and he should dwell in the presence of all his brothers and she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her thou God seest me for she said have I also here looked after him that cioth me wherefore the wall well was called beer-lahai-roi and that means the well have seized me and lives it's an interesting interlude because you know Abraham God has established this covenant with Abraham and obviously things are going wrong in the household in a really serious way like a really serious way because well he's now had a child by another woman and that the two women are not getting along and one is beating the other because of her insubordination and and contempt and so she's so desperate she runs out into the desert where she's probably going to die and God comes along and says anyways to to to to Hagar that her son shall as well be the father of Nations and so that's partly a reflection back on the power of Abraham's covenant right even though even though things are going terribly wrong locally let's say the fact that Abraham has made this overarching agreement with God means that all of these catastrophes are taking place within a bounded space with an ark we could say that's one way of looking about it and I do think I do think that that's right because it seems to me that you know if everything falls apart around you there's there's a couple of things you're gonna want you're gonna want someone standing beside you that's for sure that you can trust you're gonna want your family around you and you want gonna want them to have your back and you're gonna want to know that you didn't do some goddamn stupid thing to bring all hell down on yourself and if you're locking any of those when that crisis comes there's a high probability it will flatten you and you won't be able to get up you know it does seem to me you can ask yourself this question when things collapse around you how much utility is knowledge of your own moral virtue that's bad enough to be late it's bad to be laid load but to be laid low and to know that you were a fault you were at fault for it and worse the things that you did that you knew you did that we're wrong brought you there then I think you have nothing to stand on in that situation and that's also the circumstances under which I think you're more more likely at least to be abandoned by people around you so given that you know that the catastrophe is coming right that the tragedy of life will strike you the question is well how do you fortify yourself against that and all obviously it's to some degree you do that by being materially sensible and these old people in the test in the old testament these ancient people they weren't blind to the utility of having a good crop and some animals you know that that's a that's an integral part of their life to take care of themselves physically but they're also wise enough to know that there's an element of moral this what would you call it there's a necessity for moral integration that defends you against the catastrophe of existence even more effectively than anything material and even more that the stability of the material things is more dependent on the integrity of your spirit than the integrity of your spirit is dependent on the material things and I think the evidence for that is actually quite clear I read it read a very interesting book a while back called the wealth and poverty of Nations that was written by a Harvard emeritus professor of history and one of the things that he claimed I liked it I thought it was very smart was that the only true natural resource is interpersonal trust if you can set up a society where people trust each other then it will instantly become rich and he used the example of Japan which is a very conscientious society and very rich society but the Japanese have no natural resources right none to speak of and yet they're rich and then you have countries like the Soviet Russia and and much of South America where there's just natural resources that you know they're just like Venezuela just more natural resources than you know what to do with and the places are absolute catastrophes absolute catastrophes of cynicism and corruption and so he attempted to document the relationship between default interpersonal trust among citizens within countries and their their productivity in their GDP and their their standard of living and found a very very tight relationship and and I like that a lot and I've got a story about that quickly that I think is very interesting I'll tell you two stories one sort of generic well I'll tell you one personal first so one day I lent my car to one of my graduate students and he took it to Montreal this old Cadillac and mmm he got it was a really bad rainstorm in Montreal and he was in one of the highways that are like set into the ground and there was like six inches of water and he was turning a corner hit the brakes and skidded on the water and smacked it into the wall and on the corner of the of the bumper you know and so then he brought it back and he was very apologetic about it and and his name was Matt Shane tell you that because Matt might hear this and I could shame him a bit for doing this 20 years ago you know and he's a professor at the Ontario Institute of Technology I think now quite a successful one but anyways he brought the car back and I went and got it evaluated for damages it was like $1,700 or something to repair it and or maybe more but it was almost as much as the car was worth I thought well I'm not gonna do that so I went online and I typed in the part and if you do that you can get people to bid on sending you a used part from all over North America so that's kind of cool so there's all these junk dealers have got together and they have this you know network of communication so you put in the car part and then they send you a bid and so this guy said well I'll send you the bumper assembly which is the whole bumper and the lights for like 250 bucks and I thought yeah okay you could do that that'd be good so then I said yes and then he called me up about half an hour later this guy from way down south he had a really deep sort of Mississippi accent he said wait a sec was that for the bumper or the bumper assembly and I said well it was for the bumper assembly he said oh I thought it was for the bumper and then he said but that's ok I'll send it to you anyways I thought well that's pretty good so I said well thank you and then I hung up and then half an hour later he called me up again and he said look I just went out and looked at that bumper assembly and there's a plastic trim piece on the side and it has a scratch in it and I thought I'd better tell you that just in case you you didn't want it I thought wow that's so amazing it's like there's a miracle man it's like this guy he's somewhere in Mississippi I'm never gonna see him again ever I'm never gonna have any contact with him like he made a bad deal right because the part was worth more than he decided to sell it to me forever but he stuck with his deal and then he went over and above the call of duty he said well this part that I'm selling you to you for way less than it's worth is damaged so I thought I'd better tell you it's like man you got to recognize a miracle when you see one that was a miracle so I said hey look it's thanks for calling man it's okay I can handle the scratch said the part needed and and I got the car fixed and forgave Matt and you know it had a happy ending so so that's trust right because I didn't know him from Adam and he's a primate full of snakes just like the rest of us and yet he was willing to simplify himself to the point where I could just take him absolutely at his word and that meant we could trade even though we were strangers it's like man do not underestimate the utility of that and then there's eBay so when he Bay first started you know the idea was it's not gonna work because you'll send me junk and I'll send you a check that bounces and that'll be the end of eBay right and so these escrow agents popped up so you could ensure your transaction with them for like 10% of the transaction they would get the check and the goods and make sure that they were okay and then send them on or ensure the transaction but what happened was the escrow agents didn't make any money and the reason for that was no one cheated now you think about how amazing that is right you bring these people together across a whole continent they've never seen each other before they're never going to interact with each other again and this was before there were any reputation ratings on eBay and yet the default transaction was you describe your goods honestly including their flaws you set a reasonable price I decide to pay you you ship the goods and I pay you and it works and what happened was that eBay produced it produced a tremendous amount of capital that was previously frozen so frozen capital is when you've invested money in something but the thing is no longer useful to you so the money is just sitting there free right so to speak and you can't get it loose because well you've got attic full of junk how are you gonna get rid of that Oh II may and so all of a sudden all these things that were just junk became valuable and everybody got richer and none of that wouldn't it would have happened without the covenant that we established between each other that's predicated on trust and so you might say that trust is the currency and currency is trust because it's a promissory note right and if people lie then the currency gets to based very very rapidly and so the economy runs on trust and so that's part of the overarching covenant so abraham makes this covenant with god and he decides that he's gonna aim high and live a good life and tell the truth and that puts this boundary around him it's like a walled garden it's like a walled garden and the inside there there's all sorts of things that are happening that are complex and difficult but outside there's a boundary and the boundary is well maybe things won't it's like God says after the flood he says I'll never send a flood again that's part of the story and so there's an intimation there that no matter how bad things get they won't get so bad that they'll be catastrophic but there's a but there's a coded to that which is that you have to maintain the covenant and we don't know what that means you know because you know what you think it's pretty obvious that if you treat people well if you really think about it and you're not being naively optimistic and like you know a nice good person with all the weakness that that that that that that intimates of your being hard-nosed and sensible you understand that if you treat people if you trust people that's an act of courage if you're not naive right if you're naive it's an act of stupidity because you might get bit and you probably will and if you're not even you get bit you will suffer for it it'll traumatize you but if you're not naive and you know you can get bit then you might ask well what should you do with people and the answer is you should trust them and not because you're naive and not because they couldn't betray you and not because you don't know that they could betray oh but because if you hold out your hand in trust then you're inviting the best part of that person to step forward and that won't happen unless you take that initial step and that's courage not naivety and so to trust someone once your eyes are open that's an act of courage and that opens up the world you know when you might say okay and so there's this idea in this story that you can withstand it a fair bit of the catastrophe of life by establishing the proper covenant and by acting in a trustworthy manner and extending your hand to people properly and you might say well okay that's sensible I can understand how that would work and I can certainly see how the opposite wouldn't work because you know if I have to be absolutely terrified that you're gonna betray me at every possible moment and we're in a negotiation we're not gonna get any work done man because I'm gonna be figuring out what you're up to all the time and you're gonna be figuring out what I'm up to all the time and we're just not going to get anywhere you'll come and say you're gonna do something and I can just simplify you I can say you're gonna do what you said you do I don't have to worry about you and then the same applies to me and then we can go do something and that's how we generate wealth so then you might say well if what's the ultimate limit of that you know like we know that there's corruption in our society that people betray each other there's deceit and all of that and it causes things like the periodic collapse in 2008 which was complicated but was partly engendered by corruption like what would be the OP side if we acted if we really determined to act honestly what do you think it is that people would be able to do with the world if we stopped acting in a corrupt manner I mean what what's the like what what is the ops I do you think we could could could how far back could we push aging do you think if we hit it hard for 50 years can we triple our lifespan it wouldn't surprise me you know all these terrible diseases that beset the planet we could get rid of them there's no reason for hunger and starvation we make enough food it's like what would happen if we stopped acting badly how much better could things get well you start locally I think you start with yourself and you start with your family but you know there's intimations of the divine there's intimations of the kingdom of God and the covenant with God in the Old Testament it's like you think well we speak secularly you think well that's an unprovable assumption it's like well we'll just hold on a sec what's the Assumption here exactly what is the operon for Humanity I mean who's who's gonna say right who's gonna say especially in this day and age man there's so many things happening that you can't even comprehend them what could we do if we put all of our effort into it well you can experiment with that because you can start in your own household you can start in your own room and you could make miracles happen in the confines of your own space there's no doubt about that all you have to do is try you'll see that that happens it happens and people are writing to me and telling me that they're trying this and that that's exactly what's happening and so so we don't want to be too cynical about about where we might be headed and Hagar bore Abram a son Abram called his son's name which hagar bear ismael who is by tradition the forefather of several Arab nations and of Muhammad himself and Abram was four score and six years old when Hagar bare Ishmael to Abram so that's the end of another story and then so that section ends and then again we have an encounter between Abraham and God who and Abram was ninety years old and nine 99 years old the Lord appeared to them and said I'm the Almighty God walk before me and be thou perfect Alexander McLaren who was a biblical commentator who lived in the early 19th century said this phrase walking before God is not precisely walking with God because that's what Noah did right he says it's rather that of an act of life spent in continual consciousness of being naked and opened before the eyes of him to have whom we have to give account I was pretty happy to stumble across that because it I mean I might have picked and chosen of course you never know that whether you do that but it does seem in keeping with the narrative strain of the chapter right because what we've I bought this eye so far is that God is called Abraham and said you know get out there in the world go go to where it's unknown go to where you're a stranger and get away from the familiar go out to the unknown establish yourself and great things will come of it regardless of the proximal evidence great things will come of it and so I think that's what the walking before God refers to it's not like Abraham is acting in certainty there's no certainty here that's the act of the leap of faith even because it does require a leap of faith for you to move into the world because the world is a catastrophe self-evidently the world is a catastrophe and so there's there's there's every reason for you to assume that you should sit in your basement and hide from it but that's that's not it doesn't help it doesn't make things better and the thing is perhaps you're not built for that you're not built to hide I don't think that people are built to hide I think it destroys them and so walking before God in some sense means that Abraham is we could say is taking the lead he's the person that's going out there until the unknown God says well the great things are gonna happen he's a little short on details that's for sure so the wait is still on Abraham and that's a good thing because it also that a noble's Abraham right that's the other thing that's so cool is that if God had just laid out the whole story and and and you know brush the branches from Abraham's path while he was walking forward well then there'd be nothing for Abraham to do there'd be no nobility in his own pursuit and this is another thing that we don't understand very well it's a really tough thing to understand it's like how much trouble would you want there not to be it's a weird question right because you want to have something to contend with you want to have something that that forces from you the best that you have and so you have to have real problems it's something like that would you dispense with all your real but you could just lay down on a bed have pablum infused into your mouth you know if all your problems were solved and so maybe you want difficult problems that you can solve something like that because there's some I don't know what it is about it there's there's the overcoming and and the growth that comes along with that there's something about the nobility of the enterprise you certainly see that when you go about having children for example which is you know the psychological literature is quite clear if if you do moment-to-moment comparisons of people who have kids and people who don't have kids the people who don't have kids are happier and so psychologists who tend to get things wrong even when they make intelligent discoveries like that one immediately some of them jump to the conclusion that because happiness is the goal that well there's something about children that you know make you unhappy and that's not good it's like well wait a second and maybe that's the wrong metric it's like of course you're less happy once you have children because you have to worry about them you know my neighbor down the street who's very smart woman said to me once you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child and which I thought it was really good you know that's really smart but then it isn't well if having children doesn't make you happy the answer isn't don't have children it's like don't be so stupid about being happy that's the answer it's because there's a nobility in the pursuit right and of course now you're responsible you know who you have a new baby you think especially if you're a new parent you think what the hell is this is what am I gonna do with it you know it's like and then you're you're done for the rest of your life you never sleep properly again because you're gonna be worried about this creature that you have to take care of and but like what the hell good are you if you're not doing that or it's something else equally difficult because you just you just haven't been called out yet unless you take on a responsibility like that the idea that life is you know that happiness is the purpose of life it's like great for happiness man if it comes along you should be thrilled that it's visiting you but the notion that that's that that's what you should pursue that's that's the weakest possible notion first of all as soon as something terrible happens to you you're done it's like life is to be happy it's like well now you have cancer so how's that how's the happiness thing working out for you now or maybe it's not you you know maybe it's your father that held a Alzheimer's disease or some damn thing and you know it's like it's a rare person that doesn't have some cat-tastrophe one one person away from them it's like life is to be happy it's that's not right and and we can at least derive that from these stories that isn't what they say at all God's perfectly happy in this stories to grant the people with whom he forms a covenant happiness and prosperity but there's never a word that that's the purpose that the rule is aim high and get your bloody act together that's the rule and establish this contractual covenant with the ultimate ideal and that will see you through the catastrophes and that's a much more mature way of looking at life as far as I'm concerned because all you have to do is have your eyes half open and you see that the fundamental reality of life is tragedy and suffering there's that's inescapable the quest that doesn't mean that it it makes life unbearable or that it makes being something that shouldn't have existed right that isn't what it means but it means that you have to contend with it and you have to get ready and the willingness to adopt responsibility for yourself and for others is is the precondition for that and and then maybe if you do that properly then now and then you get some happiness you know you can sit at the end of the day and you have half an hour where your conscience is clear and there's nothing that you need to be doing and you can relax and think you know that's all right things are okay and thank God for that and that's that's maybe where you get your happiness so and that's something that's growing up man obviously and and to not know that and to not be taught that like everyone should be taught that it's so obvious we should be taught that well and that's partly what these biblical stories do and I'll make my covenant between me and thee and we'll multiply the exceedingly and Abram fell on his face yea and God talked with him saying as for me behold my covenant is with thee and thou shalt be a father of many nations God says this alot taébem right it's almost like he has to remind him now and then and it's not surprising because he keeps going through these unbelievable adventures you know that are really psychologically and socially shattering so it's a good thing that this reminder pops up in it and fairly frequently but of course Abraham is also open to it and I think what does it mean you know I'll talk personally for a moment I guess so I've asked myself a lot of questions in the last eight months man I can tell you that and I'm still asking myself a lot of questions and I've been conferring with a lot of people I had lots of people who were helping me negotiate whatever the hell this is that's happening and you know I could ask them how it was doing and they would tell me a bunch of things I was doing wrong and some things I was doing right and I could listen to them and I was asking questions all the time about how the hell I should manage this properly and you know what what I was trying to do and what seemed to serve me properly was to figure out how to do it correctly that was the issue it's like I didn't really care what happened and I guess I really don't care what and said but I do care if I do it correctly because I don't want to screw it up I don't want to screw things up and that seems to be a reasonable goal for people I mean wouldn't you like that as a goal that you don't screw things up because you can't control - you know your life isn't fully under your control by any stretch of the imagination but it might be nice to - not have your conscience eating at you saying look you know you had a big opportunity there and you mucked it up because you're weak and blind and you didn't listen that's no good the cast the catastrophe is bad enough as I said without you being the bloody source of it and so well that's Abram falling on his face I guess and also communing with God it's like you don't he wants to get it right he wants to get it right and there's these these things that beckon and promise but but it's it's bloody easy to make a catastrophic mistake and he'll do that in your life you know and and maybe humility is one of the things that can prevent that because you can look and you can think okay what am I doing wrong what am I doing wrong what can I do better how could I do this properly and then maybe you know you get you get you get the intimation of the proper way to move forward and maybe that's what protects you when things are chaotic and and in strife and who knows what that's worth neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram which means high king if I remember correctly but thy name shall be Abraham for a father of many nations have I made thee oh yes Abram for high father look at that Abraham means father of a multitude and I will make the exceedingly fruitful and I will make nations have the productive right productive and that seems to be something that's that's good to be I mean like one of the things that I've thought about deeply I thought deeply about death and the death of my family members and about funerals and I thought about it partly because I had this weird experience once that I think I told you about where I took one of my clients to see an embalming which is very strange experience and I had a chance to talk to the funeral directors you know because they have weird jobs you know there's this idea well the Freudian idea that people saw for from this terrible death anxiety and there's a whole line of social psychological theory theorizing called terror management theory that's predicated on the idea that we defend ourselves against death anxiety with our belief systems and like it's a puppet Ernest Becker's idea he wrote the denial of death which is a great book but there's a weakness in it because you see some people who aren't like that you know like emergency room nurses aren't like that and palliative care nurses aren't like that my sister-in-law's a palliative care nurse that's a hard job right because you go in there you're caring for people you have and they're in pain and they're in the last legs you're trying to make them comfortable and you have a relationship with them because how the hell are you gonna make them comfortable if you don't and then they go and die on you and that just happens that's what happens every day right and what's weird is that people can be palliative care nurses it's like how do you figure that out because people can actually thrive in the face of death strangely enough and like these funeral parlor directors they were interesting to talk to because that's all they do right they just deal with they deal with death and grief all the time and it was very interesting talking to them because I talked to two of them they found their job extremely meaningful and I asked them well you know does that what does that do to your life you know you're saturated with death and suffering and there and this is the same answer that I got from the palliative care nurse is that it doesn't undermine your life it enriches it now who would guess that right I mean what the hell that just doesn't make any sense at all but what it does is speak to human possibility because god only knows how tough you are you know I mean if you read history and you read about what people have done you think wow we're pretty tough people are I read there is a shipwreck in the Antarctica hundred years ago is so and I read the story it's not a biography if I remember correctly of the of the captain I might be wrong about that but I've got the basic story right well they had a shipwreck in the Antarctica was then they were there for a whole year in the Antarctica you know and none of them died not one II didn't lose a single man not one he kept their morale high and then they took this boat that was on the ship and they crossed like 400 miles of the roughest ocean the first frigid ocean in the world right you don't go in that ocean and then they went to an island and they walked across the island across these mountains that no one else has ever climbed since and they went to the city on the other side of the island they got a boat and went rescued their compatriots and everyone survived it's like endurance is the name of the book you read that book man you think wow people are really tough you know and it's ridiculous so who knows how tough you are and maybe you find out by going out to find out how tough you are right so you take on a challenge one that you think you can master just it's just a bit beyond your grasp and you master it and then you're a little tougher and you think hey that worked out pretty well and so then you're more of a monster and then you go out and you find another challenge that's even bigger and you think well maybe I can do that too and then all of a sudden you can and you get a little bit bigger and god only knows what the limit is of you and you find out by pushing yourself against the world and of course that's what Abraham is doing and so see we're very pessimistic us modern people you know we're pessimistic about humanity that's for sure dismal wretched planet destroying cancer on the planet right as the Club of Rome described us so pleasantly back in the 1960s you know and and I don't know maybe we're ashamed of the Cold War maybe we're ashamed of all the destruction in the 20th century and the hydrogen bomb and and that you know the continuing catastrophes of our societies and and were deeply ashamed of that and ashamed of ourselves personally but it's a hell of a thing to you know call us a cancer on the planet there's just no excuse for that because what you do with cancer is eradicated and I don't think that that's a very noble motive personally and I think it says a lot about the people who would use such phraseology that they would dare to conceptualize humanity in that manner but you know it would be nice if we could be optimistic and I think began the problem with being optimistic is that it's naive so then the question is is there an optimism that's not naive and I think there is and the optimism that's not naive isn't just a a visualization of how strong people can be so what the things that I tell people I told my students in my class in maps of meaning here is a goal you want to be the person at the funeral of your father that everyone can rely on how would that be you want to be the person who's broken and and and useless and adding to the misery in the corner and look I'm not making light of people's grief you know I understand grief but who do you want to be when there's a crisis right do you want to be the person that everyone can turn to for strength it's like why the hell not why know what that is a goal that would be a good goal because then if there's a crisis and there will be it won't be such a bloody crisis because there'll be someone there that can deal with it you know so when I went and talked to these people that if you know whom I envisioned that I thought okay well this is something you have to contend with if you're going to be alive an adult you have to contend with death and suffering and you have to be ready for it and you have to be there for the person because that's all they're gonna have and so there's a goal man and in this time of nihilism you know it's what's the point of life people ask and and they're taught that at universities what's the point of life everything's interpretation humanity's a cancer on the planet you know well how about no how about not that how about that there's something to us [Applause] and I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be a god unto thee and to thy seed after thee and I will give unto the into thy seed after thee the land wherein thou art a stranger all of the land of Canaan because of course Abraham went out into the land of strangers right but it says that he'll master if he if he keeps his covenant he'll master the land of strangers that's a wonderful thing to know and I think a true thing you know because if you're dealing with strangers I've dealt with lots of strange people in my life if I'm a clinical psychologist and that isn't to say that everyone that I've dealt with was strange because that's not the case but I have encountered some very strange people and you know the way to deal with strange people is to you never lie to a strange person that's the thing especially if they're paranoid you never lie to someone who's paranoid it will come back to bite you and if you're in an extreme situation with someone who's very unpredictable the only thing you have that works is the truth that works I'll tell you a little story this is in my book so I had this landlord in Montreal he lived next door to me and he was an exhales angels biker he'd spent a lot of time in prison and his wife had borderline personality disorder and she committed suicide when I lived there and here's a rough guy and he was a québécois he spoke ul which I could hardly understand and he didn't really know what to make of me and I didn't really know what to make of him but we got along you know I was very careful talking to him as you might imagine but but I was it was very anyway we went over and my wife and I went over there and we had the spaghetti dinner one night and we sort of communicated and I bought a poster from him because he made these wooden posters that had neon on them and that's how he made a living he'd kind of train self to be a bit of an electronics guy and so he made these things and he was trying to quit drinking and we talked about that he was a lot older than me he was like 20 years older than me I was about 25 at this point and we got along pretty well but every now and then he'd go out and get and drink and he could really drink you know like he was one of these guys who could drink like 60 beer and you think well no one can drink that much and you're wrong I studied alcohol for like 10 years some of my subjects fathers drank 40 ounces of vodka a day and had been doing it for 20 years so you can drink a lot and he could drink a lot and what would happen he was trying to not drink but he'd go out and go on a binge and then he'd be gone for like three days and he'd drink up all his money and then we'd hear him out in the backyard howling at the moon with this little little ugly dog he had you know and he'd howling the dog would howl and he'd howl and the dog would howl and and it was rather unsettling and made my wife nervous and and but worse you know now and then he'd come to the door at like 3:00 in the morning eh and he'd knock on the door and he'd be standing there and I don't know how much experience you've had with rough guys who are alcoholic and who were drunk but it's they can be upright and unconscious at the same time and so that was the state that he was in you know he'd be just swaying and he'd asked me if I would like to buy his toaster or his microwave because he needed some money to keep drinking and you know I didn't really want to buy his toaster or his microwave but when the exhales angel Jew all speaking 60 beer drunk okay but while biker shows up at your door at 3:00 in the morning and offers you to sell offers to sell you his microwave huh the easiest thing is to say I really need a microwave so so you know I bought the microwave and the toaster and some other things but then but then my wife talked to me and she liked my landlord you know even though she was afraid of him she liked him and and she said you can't buy any more any more appliances because it's not good for him and I thought huh that's an interesting problem you know so what the hell am I gonna do about this because no I don't want to buy your microwave just doesn't seem to be the right answer at 3:00 in the morning so so one time he took me out on his 750 Honda and he put me on the back of it he wanted to show me his lair I guess his hangouts and I got his wife's helmet on but it didn't fit it just sit on the top of my head and he said I got on the bike and he said if the cops chase us were not stopping and the way we went and we went to these like these bars downtown on sound the road they were very rough places he got into like four fights that night because he was a rough guy you know and he's kind of punk guys would come up to him and sort of challenge him and act stupidly around him and he was very skeptical and if you were acting stupidly around him for any length of time he just hit you because he felt that that's what you deserved and perhaps he was right you know so so I had first-hand opportunity to observe him so anyways he sure enough about a week or two after we had this conversation he showed up at the door gnarrk gnarrk gnarrk you know I open the door and they were standing there you know with his eyes kind of half closed and he was swaying and he had I don't remember what the appliance was this time but he wanted to sell it to me and I said I know what all I can buy this I'm not gonna buy this because I know you're trying to quit drinking and if I give you this money then you're gonna go and drink it up and it's not going to be good for you and what else did I tell him I think I told him as well that this whole thing of him coming to my house at like in the morning was scaring my wife who he liked and that it had to stop and believe me man I was thinking about what I was saying because he was watching me like a rough guy watches you and a rough guy watches you like this he thinks if you say one thing that indicates contempt you're gonna bloody well pay for it and so I was finding my words like you know I was crossing a swamp and trying to look for the for the rocks underneath the surface and I said what I had to save Harry very carefully and he looked at me for about 15 seconds and that's a long time to be looked at at 3:00 in the morning and he left and he never came back to sell me anything again and we got along fine but that's a good illustration of this issue with regards to truth and success in the strange land because I was in the strange land when I was talking to my neighbor my landlord then and I managed to say what was true carefully enough so despite the fact that he was a very violent person and that he was a very intoxicated person and that he had every reason to be suspicious of me and we couldn't communicate very well and I didn't do what he wanted that he took it and he left and there was no problem and life went on just fine after that and so we don't want to underestimate the utility of establishing this bounded relationship with the ideal and attempting to live with some nobility in truth while aiming at the highest ideal there's nothing about that that's anything but strengthening and positive and it's exactly what you need to set against the catastrophe and uncertainty of life and as far as I can tell that's what these Abrahamic stories are attempting to communicate so we'll stop there thank you [Applause] I have to make an announcement I'm going to do a talk August 22nd I think not sure of the date but all I'll find out with GAD sod from Concordia and so and with a with the next social worker named Serena Singh and with faith Goldie I think faith is going to be there as well so the tickets for that will go on sale I'm not hosting this someone else is dealing with it but the tickets for that will go on sale within approximately a week and I'll post that on my I'll probably make an announcement on youtube but I'll twist Twitter it Twitter it and all of that so and I think I mentioned to you guys last week that I would like to continue this series but I think I'll do it once a month and I'll try to do it in this theater but I haven't got word from the people who run the theater that's the University whether or not it'll be accessible but I'll figure something out and so oh hi Serena Serena is the person who's going to be hosting this it's August 22nd 7 to 10 p.m. at Ryerson ok tickets go on sale Monday all right and then and then oh there's a special freedom of speech edition of the Hemmingway's restaurant Jordan Peterson discussion group tonight so that's at 10 p.m. so you're all welcome to attend that so that's 142 Cumberland Street ok so that's it for announcements I guess and then let's say for questions yes I was going to let you ask the first question last time wasn't I ok so I will do that and so let's make sure again everybody to speak into the mic clearly so that the YouTube people can hear and you know the ghostly YouTube people and so go ahead shouldn't I was quite impressed with your presentation last week and I wasn't quite sure where it was going at one point and what neither neither was knowing and that's ok because at one point I I thought what you basically were talking about this is what I saw you're embodying mind body and spirit and bringing it all together as one and you touch on it a bit tonight when you when you talk about truth this is where we need to go right and I know you see be positive and all that and yeah that's right I agree it's scary what's going on right now however we have the power to stay in the positive what you talked about last week you talked about using our intuition which I consider our higher self using consciousness and you made reference I can't remember exactly what you what you said but you held your hand and you talked about emotions and bringing intellect on top and when you said emotions everything just lit up for me because I'm thinking that's our heart chakra that's what combines our lower self our physical being the material stuff all the all the stuff that doesn't really motivate us with our higher self I mean you talked about emotion I want to talk about the emotion of love and I find so many people are terrified it's a four-letter word I know but it doesn't have to be bad okay so I remember why when I talked to you last week I wanted you to ask this question so okay so I've talked a lot in this lecture series about truth and know I think there's a battle in the biblical stories all the way through between love and truth and in terms of their primacy and so and I've concentrated a lot on truth in my own thinking but I stay and it's hard to talk about love because it's a word that people have mouths to death you know as soon as you start talking about love then people should just go into a different room and and not listen to you you know because it gets it can get sappy and new-agey just like that and and I don't like that at all but but it still has something that has to be contended with and I think so I've been trying to conceptualize let's say what this covenant might might constitute and I think the love part so here's this so you know there's this book by Goethe called Faust and it's in two volumes first one and falls to logically enough one was written much later than the other and Faust basically sells the soul to the devil for foreknowledge and the devil in Faust is mephistopheles and mephistopheles is quite a well-developed character and Bertha has Memphis dollies say what he's about which is really quite cool so it's like the adversary of the world evil itself gets a chance to speak and make its case and Goethe thought this was so important that he actually had Memphis Tov Lee's announced himself once in Faust one and then using the same words you know phrase differently again in in part two it really struck me it really struck me and so what Memphis dolefully says is that the world is such a charter house of suffering and destruction that it would be better if it never existed and so that what he's working to is to bring existence to an end because it is not justified by its suffering that's like--that's it's an argument very similar to the argument that is made by Ivan camera camera radsolv thank you thank and say you can't pronounce them or live with them you can but he basically he's an atheist and does a very good job of detailing out the Atheist argument or it may be an anti theist argument and he's arguing with his his brother Alyosha who's a monastic novitiate who was a very good guy but not an intellect Ivan's own intellect and a very powerful one and he basically tells le osha that the all of the cosmos isn't worth the suffering of one child he tells this story about this and this Dostoyevsky took this from a newspaper about this parents that locked their four-year-old daughter in an outhouse overnight and she screamed about it until she froze to death and so Dostoyevsky used that argument he tied that into Ivan's anti-theist argument against le OSHA it's very very powerful argument The Brothers Karamazov is an absolutely mind-boggling amazing book I would highly recommend it and so that's a Memphis awfully in perspective mr. Feeley in perspective perspective is that being itself is so corrupt that it shouldn't exist so then you think okay well that fair enough that's a decent argument it's understandable but the problem comes when you try to implement that and what happens when you implement it as far as I can tell you adopt out Memphis to aphelion attitude of bitterness and and destruction is that you make all the suffering that you're complaining about far worse I think that's what happened at the base of things in the 20th century is that there was a powerful movement among human humanity to bring being itself to a halt you know what culminated in the development of the hydrogen bomb and and the high probability for many of many periods of time that we were going to do something permanent and fatal which seems like a bad idea it seems like a bad idea well so what's the opposite of the missed aphelion attitude and I think the opposite of that is what's presented in the biblical stories in the guise of love and that is the wish that things would be good it's something like that that's what love is I think is that it's the attempt to orient yourself towards making things better and it's predicated on something like a deep appreciation for being despite its suffering and deficiencies and and maybe a decision that you're going to act to bring about things to move things towards the good and I think that's the thing that sets the parameters of that of them it's it's the opposite of the Memphis to fillion attitude it's like to work towards the betterment of being because you've decided that you're going to open your heart to existence something like that and it's within that framework that truth takes place I think his truth has to serve something it had controls can serve truth but it has to be bounded inside something and I think that that's what it's bounded inside so what I was going to refer to with that was David Hawkins real power versus force and he put it on a quantifiable scale all different emotions he called it consciousness and he put love at 528 Hertz he put shame at 20 I'm not sure if I've got these 100% right guilt I think at 30 fear at 50 and it shows you how far the people who were really knocked down have to get to love and I'm thinking if we could quantified love on a term it means different things to everybody and rightly so but can we get to that frequency and if you look at the sofas you know what you know the musical notes I'm afraid of I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you to stop if you would because I should I should go to another question thank you very much okay let's [Applause] so you've been an educator through the rise of the smartphone and my question basically relates to procrastination and tastily needless tastily specifically and given the unprecedented level of distraction that we have in today's world I just wanted to get your perspective from a psychological standpoint on other than cleaning your damn room what would you suggest to a student who's looking to overcome these things well I think with any let's call it addictive process I mean email is powerfully addictive right hardly it's it's a slot machine and I mean that technically so when you pull it's that's a variable ratio reinforcement schedule if I remember correctly and it's very addictive because if you pull on the slot machine arm enough you will win and you never know which poll will reward you and so not only is that addictive it's very hard to extinguish that and so emails like that because there's always something beckoning and now and then it's a jackpot and social medias like that because you know people are posting interesting things and so well how do you overcome an addictive process and partly you do it by replacing it with something better right so when people study drug and alcohol use they they often make an elementary mistake which is to try to figure out why people use drugs and alcohol that's that's not a smart thing to wonder we know why people use cocaine cocaine directly stimulates these systems that produce positive emotion it's like so there's no mystery there the mystery with cocaine is very very simple why don't people take cocaine all the time until they die that's the mystery really because you can get isolated rats to do that so and and for some people alcohol has the same kind of effect except it's mediated by opiates but more often what people have to do to get themselves out of an addictive process is to find something better to do to replace it and so I would say the problem with the gadgets and I mean they're amazing things is that they interfere with they proximately interfere with medium to long-term goals I would say and so I think the first thing you have to do to bring them under control is figure out what it is that their use is interfering with it has to be something important so you think well I want to do something important what is that it could be personal maybe you want to have a relationship you want to get married you you want to have kids you want to have a career that's meaningful you know you wanna have a life you you want to have an Abrahamic adventure and be the father of Nations let's say we can't be ratting away on your cell phone in doing that and so I think I think part of it is to set your sights high and make a plan and figure out who you could be and see if obsessive utilization of smartphone fits into that vision of nobility and it will partly because they're they're unbelievably powerful communication devices but so so often it's it's for lack of something better to do and it also interferes so that's about the best I can do with that [Applause] hello dr. Peterson so you've been you've been talking with some of the conservative candidates for leadership this year any you talked with most all of them right not all of them but a number of them yes you talked with Andrew though right yes I did yes so so something very interesting popped up in my Facebook feed so it was a ad for the Conservative Party and it was suggesting that we thought you cut funding to public universities that don't support free speech and yeah that was probably my fault yeah see precisely because because this is something you say in some of your Wilder moments you suggest that we should cut the university's funding by 25% and let them battle it out for the remains and he's taken that you know his his platform but now what you're doing is well you're well one of the things you're doing is you've created this website that identifies the postmodern lexicon and helps people distinguish between postmodern courses and not and so people don't take them or take them if they want yeah yeah so that's it's it's it would be interesting to know like what sort of malevolent postmodernist just study you meticulously and try to use all your knowledge of it anyway so but but what you've said though you said that what we need to do is starve it out from the yeah look so yeah I do I know where you're going so about two weeks ago three weeks ago I went up to northern Saskatchewan and my parents have a cottage up there it's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and there's no cellphone although we do have internet now which is you know probably bad and good but anyways I got to take a bit of a break which was good because I haven't really been able to think because you know more broadly about will say what I'm doing cuz who they held I don't know what the hell I'm doing exactly this is a this is all very strange and but but one thing I thought about I was out on the lake I was canoeing around and I thought I had thought about war you know because I was very irritated I'm very irritated about what's happened to the universities and there's a hint of malevolence about it and I I'm not a fan of ideological possession and I've been set back up on my heels a lot over the last eight months by the the onslaught of what emerged when I said that there was words I wouldn't say and so it's put me into a defensive posture let's say and I had been thinking in terms of war metaphors you know like this is a battleground and that there's a war going on an ideological war and I do believe that that's true but then I was reading and I did this partly for this course I was reading the Sermon on the Mount and one of the things that says is resist not evil and I don't know what to make of that line and so I was talking to a bunch of people about it and reading about it a lot and trying to figure out what it meant and partly what it means is don't waste time right because when you fighting against something then there's something else you're not doing and then I thought also when I was out there on the lake I thought well do I really want to be in a war because of war that's not that's not that's not that's not heaven that's for sure it's really stressful and people get hurt and so I thought well maybe that's just the wrong way of thinking about it even though there's a battleground issue here and I thought well wait a second maybe maybe the right thing to do in a situation like this and this is maybe something that those on the alt-right might consider is that the right thing to do maybe is to outline a better way rather than go up directly on the attack now that might be seem somewhat at odds with my idea of the website and perhaps it is somewhat a towards without I'm I'm not sure about that but what I'm trying to do instead of conducting this like a war let's say is to conduct it like a movement towards something better and and that would be better now with regards to cutting the universities funding I thought about that too and I thought wait a second that's not going to work out because it's inviting political interference into higher education now the political interference might be of the counterbalancing kind because the evidence that the humanities in particular have tilted almost a hundred percent to the left is overwhelming and so maybe some counterbalance from the right would set things more towards the middle but the problem is is when you open up the door to political interference with higher education content you can't close the door again and so on reflection I thought that it probably was a suboptimal idea and that would be better instead was to and what of this is what I want to do when I launch the website I want to ask students the students who will be using it's like what do you want from university because here's here's your options you can you can come out ideologically possessed right you can buy this doctrine this pathological doctrine and you can become bitter and resentful and you won't learn to communicate properly and you won't read the great works of civilization and you won't learn to think and write you won't become Noble in body and spirit is that what you want or do you want the opposite do you want a real education and then I want to explain what that means like I did tonight to some degree you know that there's absolute value in learning how to put yourself together and to communicate and to familiarize yourself with with with the classic works of civilization and I want to offer that I want to do what I can to offer that as the proper alternative instead of staying in sconce tin this notion of a battle which is just I just don't think it's the right metaphor so either in dr. Peterson I just want to say that I think what you're doing is absolutely miraculous it helps change my life and I'm sure at least raise your hand if dr. Peterson has helped change your life so for the better or for the worse ask him to look at it well it's about it's about 40 people maybe and that's miraculous you know and I think and and you're thinking is gonna be it's gonna be it's gonna be all over the place in the Canadian election in two years and I think that God that's a horrible thing to go you better watch out for it buddy and uni and and and there's there's gonna be a lot of talk about how how how andrew shears political message is gonna stem from yours and i think it's really important that he he doesn't censor himself like other conservative politicians are doing and because i don't know we need to and unite under a valid thoughtful articulate conservative voice and what do we have now we have we have trump that's what's you know we don't have any we don't have any strong articulate male voices in our in our in our political discourse right now that's what it's definitely time for you to develop one so looks like you're on the right path yes great belt it out man okay so i'll try to be succinct I have two comments and one question okay first comment as you mentioned how you were prevented from uploading your YouTube video from last week yeah I actually turned that lecture and I make pretty detailed notes okay I've got it it's my accounts reinstalled restored rien stored hahaha restored yeah and so it's okay it's okay it's it's straightened out and I'm going to upload all the videos to a bunch of other sites and so this isn't going to happen again so but I appreciate that some lectures and I do one okay yeah my second comment is about sort of kind of going into the commentaries of christian theologist over the centuries like you've done yourself i just would like to encourage everybody to also look at not just Western Christianity but also Eastern Christianity like the Orthodox writings there's a big difference between the two and that the Western sort of theology comes out of the Roman Roman law Roman justice so there's a lot more of an emphasis on cannot justice and Christ came he died on the cross bar so there's that look kind of like legal payback mmm right whereas the Eastern the Eastern theology is a lot more it focuses a lot more in love and on sort of the the positive aspects and if you do read like the first four centuries of Christianity where there was no schism there's very little mention of like a sort of legalistic framework it's a lot more I don't know a per se or a more heartfelt I guess so I think it's important that we also in the West look at the Eastern counterparts had the center of this malevolence that you mentioned so like you know this whole thing about demonizing the opposition saying that they're they're heartless they haven't all of this and that I perceive that as a lot of fake love and I think that we have to keep in mind what true love is sometimes it looks ugly like in dealing with psychiatric patients maybe like other countries are not as liberal as Canada but the gate results are a lot more often you know psychiatric patients on on the road for example in Greece where I'm from so yeah that's kind of my comment that we need to focus a lot more on what real love is I think and not just the the kind of love that he can put on a scale because I don't need to keep put love on a scale so I've been talking and some of you know to this guy Jonathan pazzo who's a an orthodox Carver and he started a YouTube channel and he's talking a lot about Orthodox issues and I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Orthodox Christianity but from what I understand of it so far there's plenty to be learned so yeah I'm Orthodox myself I just recently came back to my faith two years ago basically that was the original Christianity then there was the Schism of 1054 between East and West because of the the conflicts that these new shamanic Christians have with the Pope and then after that you also had the schism internally within the West between Catholicism and and the Protestants so that's kind of like the big difference said that Christianity actually came from the East so I think that's why it's important that we look at the most ancient types because those were the ones that were closest to the original message so not my question it's about atheism back you might hear a lot of times people criticizing anybody that has any sort of belief in a deity or God that you're just somebody that has an imaginary friend yeah you know like the the Heavenly Father that you have to adhere to that you have no well of your own you know then there's also like wouldn't the contrary argument be that okay so if I have a good relationship with my father and that's why I'm more likely to accept a higher deity and I could I be that you as an atheist maybe you have conflict with your father and that's why you're adverse to kind of submitting to a higher being that mechanically is your life well you're you're you're attempting a psychoanalysis of atheism you know and and there's many factors that go into atheism I would say that you could make that case in some situations but not in all I do think though and I think this is perhaps where your question is stemming from is that it's no fluke that at the same time that one of the consequences of the death of God that Nietzsche announced back in the late 18-hundreds is the all-out assault on masculinity that's occurring in our culture now and those things are associated and I do think that does have to do with a lack of faith in the masculine spirit and that's a very bad thing because that's a bad thing for everyone obviously because women have a partially masculine spirit and they have to put up with men and so to demolish that or to fail to nurture it which is certainly what's occurring is just a pathway to absolute disaster so yeah Peterson so this is the type of question that you hate because it's in the category of white why you believe what you believe and it's a type of question that makes you say if I have it right from the last time quote what the hell makes you think it's any of your business song right okay try to frame it properly okay and I'm asking this at lecture 10 of 12 and after having listened to quite a few hours of you here and elsewhere okay and in so in your second interview with transluminal media you lay out a few things I have some quotes here I'll skip them for brevity you get to the point where you're discussing the embodiment of the logos by christ as a historical figure and then you say quote is this resurrection real did his body resurrect I don't know in today's lecture you've alluded to the fact that there are states of consciousness that perhaps we don't know how to access anymore and let's say that I'm with you there let's say I'm with the idea that they're unknown there are unknown ways to get intimations of the divine that the embodiment of the logos is associated with physiological transformations the upper limits of which are unknown and that we might currently classify as paranormal but to dumb it right back down to my level I'm asking about the guy commonly depicted with long hair nailed to a cross until that is a doorknob and all of this goes to the heart of the question of literalism and religious interpretation it goes to the heart of kind of you know what we're doing here at this lecture series are we examining the psychological significance of these stories or are we entertaining the possibility of these fantastical events I might be struggling with the concept but I haven't been able to square away and reconcile those statements by you so the question is on the on the question of the resurrection of Christ why is your answer to your own question I don't know instead of at the very least probably not well you're definitely right about me hating that question well I called this series to psychological significance of the biblical stories for a reason you know and the reason was that I'm partially qualified to talk about such things when I step outside of that then I'm not where I should be I don't think that see I don't think that this is I'm not gonna get this right I can't get the words exactly right this isn't about what I believe personally it's partly because I don't know what I believe I don't know what I believe the world's a very strange place I've had some very strange experiences in it I don't think it's helpful for me to step outside my my jurisdiction and speculate precisely the easiest thing would be to say I think I said what I had to say today I don't think that we know what the upper limits of human possibility are I don't know what that means metaphysically what I do understand from the Gospels is that even the accounts of Christ's resurrection are complex and difficult to understand I think from reading you in large part that you can make a very strong case for the symbolic meaning of the death and resurrection I think it does stand for the capacity of the human logos to die and resurrect continually as it strives upward I'm not willing to say that that's all it means because I don't know what everything means and I don't know about the fundamental metaphysics of being like I do believe that it's accurate to construe being as a battleground between good and evil I believe that I believe that is the most accurate way of representing being it's not the most accurate way of representing the object world that's not the same thing being is that set of experiences which we inhabit and that's only partly objective and it's not obviously reducible to the material not in any straightforward way because we don't understand the material substrate of being at all you know it's it's and when we do attempt to understand it say at the quantum level we run into mysteries that that baffle the most the most intelligent of us and aware so I'm going to have to leave the question hanging but partly because partly because I don't know what I think but partly because there has to be a line between what I believe and what what I can communicate you know what you believe is beyond your capacity to articulate if you the most the deepest levels of belief and I can only share with you what I have actually come to understand and there's things that I don't understand and that's definitely one of them I don't know how to draw a line between the symbolic significance of the biblical events say the symbolic and psychological significance of the biblical events and the metaphysics that's underneath them and I think you see the same thing in Jung because when Jung writes technically and formally he never talks about God he always talks about the image of God which is not the same thing the image of God would be your subjective experience of God it says nothing about the objective reality of God because your subjective experience can't say much about objective reality but even in Jung you get this mix you know sometimes it's psychological but then he he makes a metaphysical move and I think that reflected also his the limits of his knowledge because Jung had profound revelatory experiences it was a very strange person you know and I I think so I think what's best for me is to stay on the ground that I am competent on and to say what I can say about the psychology and to reach beyond that briefly when it's necessary but other than that to leave it to hell alone till I understand it better assuming that I ever do so [Applause] because of these lectures I've been reading the Bible and I'm obviously not finished but I'm fairly familiar with with how it goes and I've been thinking about two parts of it in specific which is the story of Isaac and the crucifixion of Christ and particularly one of the things like that Christ says on the cross which is my God my God why have you forsaken me and I've been trying to understand that because that's one hell of a thing for the Son of God to say and you think that would have been edited out yeah no seriously it's like why isn't that gone you know it it it's it's very inconvenient yeah and in well we haven't you haven't touched on the story of Isaac yet but there's this thing the cult typology which I'm sure you're aware of but basically the idea that what's going on in the Old Testament is sort of the laying out of types for Christ and that Isaac is essentially a type of Christ because they have all these similarities and so I've been thinking about it in that context and thinking about the parallels between them in between Isaac and Christ and one of the things I also struck me was mostly the differences between Isaac and Christ in the main difference it seems to me is sort of a difference in direction of sacrifice so the sacrifices of Abraham Abraham sacrificing his son to God and then the sacrifice of Jesus is God sacrificing his son to mankind and I've been trying to understand basically how that works and in relation to the new and Western civilization for 2,000 years yeah well there is these transformations of sacrifice right that can so the next thing that happens in these stories is that the circumcision circumcision starts to come in as a sacrifice and it seems to be something like the beginnings of replacement for sacrifice of animals it's you know there's this the psychologize ation of sacrifice so first it's pure external and acted out and then it becomes something that's more conceptual like it becomes embodied in the form of the circumcision and then it becomes more conceptual and that conceptual transformation keeps occurring and and it seems to well it culminates to some degree in this idea of the sacrifice of Christ who's who's God his son to mankind but the sacrifice is much more complex than that right it's also Christ sacrificing himself to God and and I think that the the issue there is something like well let's say you're supposed to offer up the best that you have to God that's the sacrifice that's what happens with the high quality animals that that Abel sacrifices okay but there's something better than the best that you own well what's that well part of it might be well the relationships you have with people are you willing to sacrifice them to pursue the highest good well then are you willing to sacrifice yourself or your son like your son might be that's a tough one I can understand the idea of sacrificing yourself better I'm still wrestling with this story of Isaiah obviously because that's such a complicated story and I do think it's reasonable to think about it as a form of foreshadowing at least the way the Bible is set up of course people who aren't Christian would agree with that but that that's fine um the idea that you would offer yourself as a sacrifice to God that seems to me to follow quite logically because well obviously you have nothing greater to give than the best of yourself right so you sacrifice yourself to the highest good and that's part of the man that's part of the way in which humanity is redeemed that makes sense to me that just seems like for me that's that's a pretty straightforward psychological truth the son issue that's that's a lot tougher thing to wrestle with because one of the things I was thinking with the with what Jesus says on the cross is that one of the interpretations of that is basically that Jesus in that moment is human basically it's not this not right it's just Jesus the human right but that always kind of felt a little bit like avoiding the question to me because you can't just pause it something like the Trinity and then say oh but in this moment that doesn't go right that doesn't count so but if we think about it in that way of like the difference in the direction of sacrifice and it seems to me that in the sacrifice whoever is making the sacrifice serve aims toward something so Abraham is so reaching for the divine when he sacrifices when he's going to sacrifice his son and so though I mean maybe God is reaching toward the human and so that would make some sense of that interpretation that Christ is only human in that moment right that that it's the sacrifice is accomplished and the reaching down is accomplished but I'm still after a question what do I make of that because that's one I mean it's useful to have a problem like that because it gives you something to think about right and something to study further and it's it's it's a it's a major it's a major problem I mean the whole issue of well we could say well what's the relationship between the divine and the human which is obviously brought to the forefront and the idea of Christ right but it's a personal issue because part of the issue is what's the relationship between you as a finite entity and the transcendent infinity that surrounds you well there's some relationship because here you are and the transcendent infinity around you exists so there's a relationship the question is what is the relationship and and we don't know that and and and it's dramatized in that story and so I mean partly the the reason that there's so much conflict and confusion in that stories because it's trying to bring opposing things together right how can something be God and man at the same time it's just like the genie which is the root word of genius by the way the genie is this incredibly powerful force that can grant wishes right but it's constrained in this tiny little space there's an intimation there that for something to be real it has to straddle the divide between the finite and the infinite and that's what human beings do I think to some degree and that's dramatized in that story but it doesn't mean that we understand it I mean you know that sometimes you're going to feel that way when you're called upon to make a sacrifice you're going to feel that you've been betrayed by everything I mean the story set up that way right Christ is betrayed by tyranny he's betrayed by his best friends he's betrayed by his mortality like it's an archetypal story because and he's innocent so the story can't be any worse that's why it's archetypal and I mean the story says to some degree that under such conditions even God himself would have dealt it's something like that and that's a real that's a powerful idea it's a very powerful idea so that's the best I can make out of that for now we have to stop so will so convene again in a week thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,326,052

Rating: 4.8109117 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, bible, christ, christian, christianity, existentialism, faith, free speech, god, gods, jesus, lecture, openness, personality, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, religion, spirit, toronto, truth, university of toronto, yeshua, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Abram, Sarai, Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Petreson, University of Toronto, political correctness, pc, politically correct

Id: 3Y6bCqT85Pc

Length: 148min 21sec (8901 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/nd646]

If you think anything in the bible is obvious, your room might need a little bit more cleaning

[u/chazthewolf]

Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to the devil.