Is Peterson's position on morality and religion disregarding Truth?

>falling for the truth meme
You aren't going to make it, OP.

There is no truth in morality, or at least it would currently seem like that. People turned away from Christianity because supposedly God was "not real" but in the time since, no one has been able to "find a replacement", i.e. an actually "real" justification for any set of moral values.

For the vast majority of people, ethics – "How am I supposed to act?" – has changed from "How am I supposed to act in order to be a 'good person'?" to "How do I have to act in order to be happy?"

Now what Peterson is preaching is obviously just this, Christian values can also serve to just make you a happy person, irregardless of whether there is a God to judge you on the final days. (And if you start practicing, belief may still come to you eventually.)

There’s myriads of people still preaching Christianity the old way, but Peterson is doing something else, in employing hedonist/atheist/nihilist culture’s underlying philosophy against it. If there are no objective ethics, you might AS WELL practice Christian values, which has a good chance of partly curing that loneliness and emptiness that you experience in today’s first world.

I guess being "a good person" is what makes you happy in the end, and while hedonistic activities like eating a bunch of ice cream or playing video games or living off welfare do sort of make you happy for a while, they will not make you feel like a "good person" ----- there are belief systems cropping up already that are trying hard to lend that "good person" spin to typical hedonist activities, like making ice cream consumption "fat acceptance/pride" I guess, and playing vidya becomes a political statement for all sorts of gamergaters and feminists and all that, but even in a totally nihilist world that accepts there are no objective moral values, it seems that it’s not easy to get your head to accept a warped believe system like that.

>what that truth is will always be variable from person to person

The absolute state of mmemerson cucks

?

What I said is objectively true, the moral belief systems of the average American or European vary hugely between individuals, even the extent to which they believe or disbelieve in God.

There may be an objective truth above it all, but it seems our human capacities are not up to figuring out the particulars

>What I said is objectively true
No, it isn't. BELIEF varies from person to person, truth doesn't. True propositions are true regardless of how many people believe them.

What you're proposing is literal relativism.

I'd add on to this, that the truth Peterson is offering is proposed to be exactly that and that the old mechanism therefor was God. Now, Western society doesn't have this reckoning at the end of itself -an abstraction that equals morality-, so we need a way to create the image of ourselves as a good person, in order to have morality. Technology, very easily argued in fact, fills this function via our constant supervision and self-promotion that put us in the sphere of social critique with the eternity that's supposed to be the internet. What underlies this, however, is egoism, which would be fine individually, but is incredibly dangerous given our nature as social beings. So, the question remains for a fundamental basis, or barometer, with which we can judge actions, that everyone agrees with is a valid discretion but in varying. The proper counter is to value human life above all else, which is actually what's happened as of late, and per Kiekergaard it does have the expected restrictions that come with atheism.

Bio ethics are imo the only solution, the thing that bounds us as humans, a common biological neurology that has a tendency for commonaoity over disimiliarty, is the only reasonable way we can evaluate human behavior.

In terms of morality we have no access to what the truth may or may not be, rendering it belief

Stop memerson threads please.

First: from what I know about Peterson, his view of "truth" is shaky and definitely not his best content. He confuses the notion of something being true i.e. factually correct, with something being "right" in a moral sense.

Surprisingly, I don't think this weird confusion on Peterson's behalf is fatal to his understanding of morality and religion. Let me expand:

>regarding his position on the "truth" of the Logos...
He views the biblical stories as "true" because he believes that they are true in a metaphorical sense; they are allegorical stories about human experience, morality, and even—in a shakily supported but still interesting way—the history of mankind. These stories represent a kind of wisdom that is "infinite" and so (necessarily) divine. This links with his content regarding the Logos, or "the Word". Note that he—like most Christians—believes in evolution; he necessarily views the stories of the Bible as true not in a literal but a figurative sense. This doesn't discredit the authenticity of his belief, mind you.

>regarding his position on morality...
>"The way I see it it's just pretending that a christian-type morality exists because you need it but without any real reasons to think is it actually true
Peterson is careful with his wording when he discusses his belief in the existence of God. He doesn't use religious rhetoric that has become banal, so as not to repulse that slightly-above-average-IQ subset of the population who consider themselves rational beings, with no taste for language like "faith". But Peterson understands the concept of struggling with God, and has stated that he "acts like he believes in God". Again, this doesn't discredit the authenticity of his belief.

Your estimation on his view of morality is completely off. Peterson believes in objective moral values. You've got the moral argument wrong; it is not that we want God to be real because we want objective morals to exist. It is that, from the experience of human consciousness, we *know* objective morals exist and so therefore, God must exist.

comfy
and a qt too
sauce pls

>irregardless
a post that size, discredited completely by the use of a single word
nah but really your post was bad

good post

>There is a difference between not being a solipsist and not wanting to pretend believing in an absolute morality coming from the literal christian god, you are strawmaning.Peterson is the one saying morality is not real without God.
I wasn't strawmanning because I wasn't defending Peterson, but just pointing out that for something to be "satisfying and authoritative" for you, you have to first believe in it, no matter what it is.

Also I don't think that you should assume that someone is talking about "the literal christian god" when this person can't even answer "yes" to the question "do you believe that Christ literally rose from the dead?"

pls stop making peterson threads
it's been a year

>and a qt too
Wannabe singer-songwriters like her are a dime a dozen at any liberal arts anything.

Maybe when you don't take epistemology seriously you get confused and one of the results is you can't demarcate between science and pseudoscience. You can understanding things a lot easier when you can feel them... you can experience consciousness, absorb ancient wisdom, perform metaphoric interpretation and actually really know objective morals exist because you've come into contact with them personally.

Peterson beyond the metaphoric interpretations he's presenting to you is really a biological reductionist influenced primarily by the pseudoscientific theories of Carl Jung. You can't bathe in the full glory of his stupidity unless you dive into the academic scholarly charlatanism of Jungianism. [see: The Jung Cult: The Origins of a Charismatic Movement]

Also sorry to tell you but most Christians actually do not yet believe in evolution, what's been occurring [especially in America] is the opposite with the rise of more anti-intellectual sects like pentecostalism.

I like to think that you can make God out of the condensation of "all that is right and good"
As in one of this lectures, JP explained how the mythical creation of god came to be, when you have the best attributes of the greatest kings condensed into one entitiy (The king of kings). And that is a very realistic and concrete idea for the being of "god" and we can generate ideas from it as a moral pillar.
The christian mythology doesn't have to be historicaly accurate, the message is what matters.

It's so fun to see people in the US and Canada being confused by this guy. Can't you just take his positions as philosophical positions? It would be way easier. But no, you have to label him as someone who is either a "believer" or an "atheist", because you can't think outside these categories. So many of Peterson's positions could be easily undermined if they were just analyzed by a purely philosophical point of view.
But apparently all that you and your journalists can do is try call him a "christian", a "bigot" or whatever other label, trying to find personal reasons for his philosophical beliefs. He won't let himself be caught unprepared on that, and not because he's very smart, but because he's an academic: he's accustomed to discuss problems without making it personal.
People in the media, and most people outside universities never learn how to do that, sadly. And they do believe that if you hold a certain argument for the wrong personal beliefs, then the argument is wrong, which is not true.
So all I keep seeing are discussions on whether Peterson is a fascist or not, whether he's christian, whether he's antifeminist, and not one single discussion about whether his philosophical positions - e.g. on the importance of narratives for the psyche - are true or not.

This. Also, there are so many ways to believe in god - beside the christian way - both in a philosophical and in a religious manner, that to label the guy as a "christian" only because he says it is necessary to believe in a god means to oversimplify everything he says just to make him fit in one of three/four slightly compatible political labels

He himself frames the conversation in that way.
Peterson knows that murricans aren't going to listen to his existentialist / Jungian alchemical understanding of meaning and the relationship between man and being that goes along with that on its own merits, so he dresses it up as Christianity, which is simple enough because these positions are really just secular transformations and I would argue crystallizations of the fundamental truth of religious systems of meaning which have done away with the mystification.

The problem is that it's still traditionalist pandering. When Peterson advocates for responsibility, he should mention that this responsibility is actually the same thing as personal freedom, freedom being self-determination. When he talks about cleaning your room, he should also talk about the importance of learning to play with chaos, and that these two are means to each other, and not ends in themselves.
Fundamentally, Peterson is too much of an Aneris-fag, too logocentric for his own good.

Obviously the biological reductionism is pretty strongly implied, but I'm not familiar with Jung's work at all, can you expand on why it's invalid?

I agree that he is also pointing towards christianity, but I still think that to discredit someone for their personal motivations instead of addressing their arguments is just a bad argumentative strategy.
If someone tells you "you are just holding position x because you feel bad about y", it does not follow in any way that position x is wrong. The fact that I have personal reasons to believe something has nothing to do with the truth of my belief.
This is why he keeps seeming right in most interviews he does: because everyone is so focused on trying to understand his personal reasons to believe what he believes, that the arguments are left almost completely untouched. And again, I think they are not particularly complex nor difficult to dismantle if you focus on them instead of hating on the guy

Truth leads to nihilism. Anyone who wants to escape nihilism needs to depend on sophistry.

Peterson does it one way, Harris does it another, for example. Everyone who makes any normative ethical claims does. Of course they can't be open about deliberately being untruthful, but they "recognize untruth as a condition of life" as Nietzsche said. Plato already knew this, hence the concept of the Noble Lie.

Or people like Peterson are retarded and sincerely buy into their own nonsense, which is also an option given his interviews which amount to 'meaning is the realest thing in the world man you can like feel it'.

>Truth leads to nihilism. Anyone who wants to escape nihilism needs to depend on sophistry.
If this was any edgier it'd travel back in time and create the 90's.

You need a girlfriend.

Reality is pretty edgy, user.

You're missing the fundamental grounding Peterson has, that usefulness IS truth and that there are levels of truth, utility exceeding objectivity. The 'truth' that you are so concerned about in regards to him is a critical system that cannot impart morality.

>but I still think that to discredit someone for their personal motivations instead of addressing their arguments is just a bad argumentative strategy.

I do disagree with Peterson in terms of his message in some respects as well, as I've stated in the second part of my post, but I don't mind his perspective being somewhat vulnerable on a philosophical basis - there's just no way around that. The big problem is that, in modifying his message to be more easily digestible by the average American, he's not playing according to his own rules. Dude should try telling the truth more instead of gracefully dancing around it.

wow btfo :^y

The Myth of Sisyphus, if you still don't get user's boulder joke. I think what Peterson is trying to say is that truth as a concept must be governed by a sort of utilitarian framework. You can only say something is true if it leads to good things. For science, everything has an equal footing. The equation for gravity and the equation for nuclear fission are both just equations. But if nuclear weapons lead to the end of mankind, there is a deeper moral truth laid into those equations based on the results that follow. Probably a shitty analogy because you can do more with fission than blow people up, but that's my take.

>Truth leads to nihilism
Can you confirm this?

nuclear weapons prevented ww3.

all nukes are beautiful :)

Kind of falls apart because utility's neither universal nor objective

>its a Peterson episode

>go to Veeky Forums
>it's a Peterson episode
>go to Veeky Forums
>it's a -1/12 episode
>go to /x/
>it's a skinwalker episode
>go to /d/
>it's an eldritch abomination episode
Where exactly do you think you are?

truth is peterson tripped on drugs and thought he saw jesus or some shit

theres nothing to analyze beyond that

It's just basic fideism. Read some Kierkagaard.

Religion is one of the worst things to happen to the planet next to capitalism.

isn't that postmodernism?

Peterson believes in a truth that transcends ordinary being i thought.

>go to Veeky Forums
>it's a memerson episode
>go to Veeky Forums
>it's a memerson episode
>go to /tv/
>it's a memerson episode
>go to Veeky Forums
>it's a memerson episode

If it's true Truth leads to nihilism, and this statement is true, why did you write the comment? There is no point, after all. And the statement has no meaning, because meaning does not exist. Or its arbitrary, which means you are throwing your cynicism on the rest of us. You could just as easily choose another arbitrary position that makes you feel better and less negative. But you don't. You choose the one that self imposes an illusion of powerlessness, instead of an illusion of freedom. In short, fuck off.

Good post

You have core assumptions that completely disregard 'truth', you can't function without them. Furthermore, the specifics of your biology also form innate 'assumptions', further removing you from 'truth', they also form limitations, intuition, and lines of thought that are completely baseless concerning wider reality. Religion and morality do not concern themselves with truth in the slightest, nor does most philosophy.

You can easily familiarise and indoctrinate yourself into something, truth be damned. Believing in something is entirely a facet of your brain, subjective to you, devoid of rationality and truth. There is benefit in faith, if only for your mental health. For him it's about having objective meaning. The more you learn and think, the more you'll realise that there is no such thing truth as to conjure the idea of it in your brain, is no negate its truthiness.

Indoctrinating yourself into belief is antithetical to the pursuit of objective meaning, even just to the approach of objective truth. Pursuit of stability for its own sake is no virtue.

Read the book the other user mentioned, it makes a good case for how Jung essentially harnessed a psychotic experience to turn himself into a cult leader. There's also evidence that he changed the dates of his "Solar Phallus Man" case, which he used as evidence for his theory of the collective unconscious (books and info about Mithras would have been available in Germany when the patient was likely treated). The author is a clinical psychologist and a historian who has done anthropological work as well, he's well-regarded.
There's also the question of how to classify Jung. As a scientist, his work doesn't hold water. Go do a search in research and you will not find anything backing up his theories. His value as a philosopher is obviously more debatable, but SEP doesn't have an article on him so take that for what you will.