Jung Meets Transhumanism: Jordan Peterson Elon Musk Talk About God | The David Knight Show
Summary
➡ The text discusses the importance of faith and courage in facing the future, using biblical stories as examples. It argues that relying on God’s power, rather than our own strength, is key to overcoming challenges. The text also warns against the dangers of dismissing Christian values and beliefs, suggesting that doing so could harm society. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of independent, listener-funded news in preserving our liberties.
Transcript
Elon Musk in an interview with Jordan Peterson. And part of it was this transgender thing. But then there was another part of the interview that I thought was even more interesting. And that’s where Jordan Peterson, who appears to be trying to work out, you know, what he thinks about Christianity, about Jesus. He seems to be kind of publicly ruminating through these different things. And so he brought Elon Musk into that conversation that he’s having with himself. And Elon Musk identified himself as a cultural Christian. Same thing that Richard Dawkins has said. You know, culturally, I like the things that we get out of that.
Well, there’s no such thing as a cultural Christian. It really is an oxymoron. You know, the very term Christian was not a term that Christians gave themselves. It was a term that was given to them since in derision from the people there. You know, when we look at words, when we look at the etymology of Christian, at its root, what it really means is Christ’s men, or Christ’s people. You know, we look at anthropology, for example. That’s a study of people, or you would talk about something being anthropic. It looks like it was, you know, manmade global warming or something like that.
And it comes from the Greek anthropos, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, or anthropos, I don’t know. Maybe the emphasis on the wrong syllable, but what the word is, that whenever you see that A-N-T-H type of thing, or just the A-N, that means man, or mankind, if you will, or people. And so what it really means is Christ’s people. And it’s not just about a culture. It’s about whether or not they’re going to follow him. And that’s what people say, oh, those are Christ’s people, you know, out there. Well, here’s a conversation that they had in terms of the back and forth that Jordan Peterson had as he kind of challenged Elon Musk.
And I thought it was interesting because I had, when he went in and he talked to the people at Babylon B, they said, well, you know, we’re a Christian organization, so we’ve got to ask you this. What do you think about you? Oh, good, we’re done. Okay, that was really cringy, what they did. They were very much afraid of him. They should be as afraid if they’re Christ’s men. They need to be as afraid of the Lord Jesus Christ as they are of Elon Musk. But it seems to be the other way around.
Well, here is Jordan Peterson, and actually, he did a better job of challenging them. It happened to one of my- Oh, wait a second, that’s the wrong one. That’s the other one about his son here. Well, I’m having a hard time finding things today. Here it is. You know, while I’m not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise, and that there’s tremendous wisdom in turn the other cheek. And for a while there, when I was saying, I thought, well, that’s really a weak thing. Yeah, it can be.
If someone, and with respect to bullies at school, I think you shouldn’t turn the other cheek, you should pump the punctual on the nose. And then they’re after make peace with them, but they need to stop bullying you, and a punch in the nose will stop that. And then thereafter, you know, make peace. Sometimes that punch on the nose is the first step in making peace with bullies. Yes, it may, you know, change their career from being a bully to perhaps they shouldn’t be doing such things. But yeah, I think there’s- So why not bitterness? This notion of forgiveness is important.
I think it’s essential, because if you don’t forgive, then, you know, as I forget who said it, but an eye for an eye makes everyone blind. If you’re going to seek vengeance, and you have this never ending cycle of vengeance. There are anthropological speculations that we were caught in a 350,000 year cycle of not getting anywhere after modern human beings emerged precisely because of that. Because we couldn’t get out of accelerating tit-for-tat revenge cycles, right? Yeah, so I’m actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they’re very good.
So in what sense then are you not religious? Well, so Dawkins just came out three weeks ago or thereabouts and announced that he was a cultural Christian, right? And so the question- Right, I would say I’m probably a cultural Christian. I was brought up as an Anglican, and I was baptized. Although, oddly enough, my parents also simultaneously sent me to a Jewish nursery school, preschool. So it was Jesus our Lord. Well, Jews have a reputation for being religious, too, you know? Yeah, no, I might have been the only non-Jewish kid at the school.
I didn’t even realize I was a thing. But I was just singing Habanagula one day and Jesus is our Lord the next, you know. So that is my upbringing. Well, it’s kind of interesting. And when you look at it, you know, it’s so how is it, how are you not religious? And of course, the religion is going to be things that you’re told that you need to do, but it’s not necessarily meaning that you are following Christ. You know, it’s the difference. It’s that connection that is there. Must said, his beliefs could be best described as a religion of curiosity.
And I think Peterson is kind of the same way. I think Peterson is very curious about it. I really didn’t understand Peterson’s approach to it until RFK Junior talked about his religious beliefs. And he talked about his religious beliefs, RFK Junior did, in terms of Carl Jung and that school of psychology. You have the Freudian school, you have the Jungian school. I don’t know anything about those. And so I didn’t know, even though I knew that Jordan Peterson considered himself to be a Jungian, I didn’t really know what that was about until I heard RFK Junior talking about his experiences and talking about Carl Jung.
And so Carl Jung was always on look for some kind of quote unquote spirituality or something that was unusual or, you know, the universe talking to him. That’s where a lot of this stuff comes from, you know. I don’t know, there’s some force out there, some indeterminate force. I don’t want to identify it as such, these people would say. They don’t, you know, clearly there is a general revelation showing that there’s an intelligent designer and things like that. But then there is also a specific revelation in the Bible, which is what they reject.
And so what RFK Junior said was he said, he talked about how Carl Jung had had some very strange situation. I think it was a butterfly or something and appeared at his window. It’s been a while since I watched it. I forgot some of the details, but it’s basically just something that you wouldn’t expect to see this and it tied in somehow with what he was thinking. It was a strange coincidence. And so RFK Junior said, and yeah, something like that happened to help me get off of my addictions and things like that.
Well, that’s the world in which Jordan Peterson is in. That’s his worldview. So his worldview does not reject some kind of indeterminate spirituality that’s out there or something that is supernatural. As a matter of fact, it invites that in, but it doesn’t have any simple childlike faith that would result in following God, which is a key thing. And it kind of came up, I thought it was very interesting, the fact that he was trying to try to psychoanalyze Elon Musk. And he was talking about how, yeah, you’re an adventure person and all this kind of stuff.
Well, yeah, you’re not climbing mountains, I understand, but you know, you are trying intellectually to push into these different areas and so forth. And so Jordan Peterson says, yes, I’m trying to make sense out of the Old Testament. And he starts talking about the situation with the Promised Land and the spies that were sent in and came back, and Joshua and Caleb say, we can’t do it. So they say, we can do it. The other 10 say, we can’t do it. And here’s his take on it, which I thought was really interesting and strange.
Well, so one of the things I derived from this analysis I’ve been doing of the Old Testament is that faith and courage, I’ll give you an example. So when Moses is on the verge of the Promised Land, he sends scouts out to check out Canaan, because that’s the Promised Land. Now Canaan is the home of the descendants of Cain. It’s the place of people who aren’t aiming up, put it that way. Okay, so the scouts go out to look at the future and they come back in two teams. And one team says, there’s nothing but giants there.
It’s a complete bloody catastrophe. You led us out into the desert stupidly. We were better off in the tyranny. There’s no way we’re going to survive, right? And the next scouts or the other team will come back and say, well, there’s trouble there, but if we aim up and we get our act together, we can turn this into the Promised Land. And the earth opens up and swallows up the faithless scouts. And it’s the people who are led by Caleb and Joshua who has the same name as Christ, by the way, and that’s relevant.
They’re the ones that are led into the Promised Land. Okay, so what’s the meaning of the story? Well, the future is always a challenge. The moral thing to do is to advance faith and courage in the future, regardless. In some ways, it’s a weird thing because it’s kind of regardless of the data, because you can say, well, look at all the suffering that constitutes life and look at all the potential horrors of the future. And certainly people do hesitate about bringing a child into a world like this. I hear that often. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, there’s an ethical requirement that’s associated with living in the manner that would justify your life, even to yourself, to have faith and courage in the future, no matter what, right? So it’s not a foolishness or what? Defense against death, anxiety, or foolish superstition, that faith. It’s not that at all. It’s a kind of courage. It’s like, we’re going to make this work. We’re going to make this. Isn’t that interesting? These are the people who are not aiming up. I’ve never heard that expression before, but I’m assuming that, yeah, we’re going to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
We have to understand that the future is a challenge, but we have to have faith in the future. Frankly, that’s a bunch of psycho babble. Look, that’s not what that was about at all. Not at all. You don’t have to justify your life to yourself, and you don’t have to have faith in the future. You know, we’re going to gen up the strength to do this in our own strength. It was exactly the opposite. The very fact that Moses had even sent scouts into that area meant that these people were not really trusting that God was going to fulfill His promise to them.
The very fact that they sent these scouts in showed that they were trying to do this in their own strength. And so, you don’t have faith in the future. You have faith in the God that delivered them one miracle after the other to that point. He had promised them a land, and they wanted the land, but they didn’t believe the promise. They didn’t believe the promise that God was going to do it for them. And so, that was why the punishment was there. And it’s kind of interesting, I think. You know, we have these simple promises.
And it’s like, do you believe it? Right? That’s really what following Christ is about. Do you believe those promises that are there? You know, it astounds me when I see somebody like Ben Shapiro questioned about what he believes. Joe Rogan, do you believe that God parted the Red Sea for them? Well, no, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that. But I believe that that land belongs to me. Well, if you don’t believe the promise, you don’t get the land, quite frankly. People who pick and choose us, the land is not even important.
It’s the Lord that is important. They don’t believe the Lord, but they want the land. They don’t believe the miracles. But hey, I like what happens when we have a society that’s based on Christian values. Well, you’re not going to have a society that’s based on Christian values if Christ is not your Lord. It just isn’t going to work that way. It’s not going to work that way for society. You can’t say, as I’ve pointed out before, this usual thing, and actually I think it was Doug Wilson’s analogy, when he was talking about Richard Dawkins.
He said Richard Dawkins likes the fruit, but he wants to cut down the orchard. You know, he likes the Christian architecture. He likes the Christian culture and the approach to the legal system. He likes the even songs at Christmas time and all that kind of stuff. But he just doesn’t like the tree that that all came from. He’s going to cut down the root of all of that stuff. And that’s why you can’t fake it until you make it with that stuff. It’s just really simple. It’s really simple. It’s just a childlike faith.
It doesn’t have to be psychoanalyzed, and it’s not about us achieving our destiny or going to the stars or this or that, or even going to the Promised Land. The Promised Land was something that was there, but it was the promise. It was a promise. And again, not the land, but people who want the land and they want the gift, but not the giver, as I say. We’ve seen progressivism hollow out our civilizational decency and wear its skin as a suit that some people are finally waking up. The fact they don’t like this.
But what this means for the possibility of a Christian awakening or a Renaissance remains to be seen. Yeah, it’s not going to be something, and I think a good example of this is Jordan Peterson. This is not something that’s going to be intellectually attained. It’s going to be something that just like the Promised Land, you’re going to have to rely on the power of God to make those changes in you and the power of God to make those changes in society. It’s not something that, oh yeah, I’ve got a new insight here about human nature from reading the Bible.
No, it should be giving you an insight about the power of God, the power of God to change you and then to change a lot of other people like you and thereby to change society. That’s the way it’s going to happen, if it’s going to happen. This is from wng.org. They say, while it is possible to argue, perhaps, that the eclipse of Christian culture allows for a more vibrant and self-conscious Christianity to flower, it also means material harm to human dignity, to the natural family, and to the common good. But their own personal bias and agenda control is exactly what people think.
And this is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. This is extremely dangerous to our democracy. Break free from the usual script with a David Knight show, a fresh perspective bringing you genuine insights on current events. But if the show is going to stay on the air, we’ll need your continued support.
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