Another Jordan Peterson video fell across my path and caught my interest despite my determination to move on to something else. This is one of his Bible series, this one about the storyh of Jacob who becomes the father of the nation of israel. And as usual he says a lot of very interesting things about how chaaracter is formed and whatr should be nourished to develop the best character in children and that sort of thing. This is how he's treating the Bible, as stories about the formation of personaluity and character. He recognizes that the Bible is foundational to Western Civilization and he interprets its influence in these psychological terms.
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Which up to a point is interesting. But then it gets scary ads itbecomes clear that he's taking God's own revelation and dragging it down to our fleshly mentality, however high-minded his conception of the best in this life is, and in so doing he's blaspheming God and mangling God's purpose in giving us His Word.
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This gets frightening when god speaks and acts in the accounts and Peterson treats Him as merely a part of the consciousness of the character involved. Although we know God is the Actor throughout the bible, Peterson treats Him as nothing but a mental state, an abstraction in his character's minds. The characters are fiction and God is fiction. Whereas we know that the characters were all living historical human beings and God is the true real living God who gave us the bible for His own purposes.
He reifies fiction and mythologizes reality. And God is not mocked. We live and move and have our being in God., He is not our invention, we are His crdeationb, and it's scary when modernity performs its reverse alchemy and turns gold into a base metal.
So the story of jacob's Ladder becomes an archetype. It is not God continuing to guide His people toward His ultimate aim, it becomes a mere elemtn in the development of conscioousness or conscience or something like that to Peterson. This is really really scary.
