He speaks his mind, and he makes an incredible amount of sense.
But one thing he isn’t interested in speaking is a self-identification as Christian.
At the 2019 PragerU summit, he claimed “one of the most important things” is to live “as if there were a God.”
But how does he describe himself? Here’s what the professor and author had to say:
“People ask me if I believe in God…people kept asking me that question, which I really don’t like. I don’t like that question, so I sat and thought about it for a good while and I tried to figure out why. And I thought, well…who would have the audacity to claim that they believed in God? If they examined the way they lived, who would dare say that?”
It’s just too difficult to live worthy of the title:
“To believe, to believe in a Christian sense, to actually — this is why [Friedrich] Nietzsche said there was only ever one Christian and that was Christ — to have the audacity to claim that, means that you live it out fully. And that’s an unbearable task in some sense.”
Jordan recounted the “very brilliant” recent words of Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher:
“He talked about Christ’s moment of crises on the cross, when he cried out to God that he had been forsaken. And what Žižek said, was that what that meant was that the conditions of human existence are so tragic that even God himself in human form lost faith for a moment in the goodness of being.”
Very interesting point.
Jordan went on:
“I thought that was a remarkable observation, because, well, if even God himself were to lose faith under such conditions, what would you expect from normal human beings confronted with what we’re confronted by?”
Then — in contemplating the difficulty of such a label — it seems to me he issued a challenge:
“To be able to accept the structure of existence, the suffering that goes along with it, and the disappointment and the betrayal, and to nonetheless act properly, to aim at the good with all your heart, to dispense with the malevolence and your desire for destruction and revenge, and all of that, and to face things courageously and to tell the truth, to speak the truth and to act it out: that’s what it means to believe,” he said. “That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean to state it. It means to act it out. And unless you act it out, you should be very careful about claiming it.”
He doesn’t want to overstate his moral and behavioral accomplishment:
“And so I’ve never been comfortable saying anything other than, I try to act as if God exists, because God only knows what you’d be if you truly believed. That’s the central idea in Christianity — that if you were capable of believing, it would be a transfiguring event, a truly transfiguring event. And I know people experience that to one degree or another, but we have no idea what the limit of that is, and we have no idea what the possibility is within each person if they lived a life that was maximally courageous and maximally truthful. … God only knows what you’d be if you believed.”
If you truly believed…
Do you believe? Truly? How much?
It’s a good question.
“So while I try to act like I believe, he added, “I never claim that I manage it.”
What are your thoughts? And where do you sit on the spectrum of living your beliefs? Where does our nation?
Let us all know in the Comments section. And see more on the great Jordan Peterson here, here, and here.
-ALEX
Relevant RedState links in this article: here, here, and here.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger Gets Violently Attacked In South Africa, & The Video Is Incredible
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