Jordan Peterson's INCREDIBLE Journey To GOD | Heartbreaking Moments on His FAITH

so people often ask me do you believe in god which i don't i don't like that question i don't like that question i don't like that question yeah i don't like the question people have asked me whether or not i believe in god and i've answered in various ways no but i'm afraid he probably exists that's [Music] the traditions bind the community together now i'm saying that and i don't go to church you know and the reason i don't go to church is because well it drives me crazy to speak frankly i haven't been able

to sit in a situation like that ever since i was well ever really that's really the truth of it ever um i'm not convinced that that's a good thing because i do believe and i've had good conversations about this with jonathan pagio i do believe that communal return to the source of the community's ethics is actually a necessary thing and maybe i'm atoning for my past sins by doing these biblical lectures at the moment which is something that's communal and then because there's also something about going where a bunch of other people are to reaffirm

your commitment to to the good that you're also all aiming at that's that's got some power in it and i don't think that that's something that we should forego i think it's dangerous i mean look even if you're cynical about church and i guess i would put myself in that category it's certainly the case that communal church going in the 1950s say provided the average person with at least an hour a week where they were contemplating no matter how poorly the purpose of ethics in life and and the idea of a higher purpose and a

higher meaning in life and you got to think that spending an hour a week thinking about that is better than never doing it at all i don't know how to that tradition can be revivified in a meaningful way but i think it's i really do think it's a catastrophe that we've lost it because we don't have a center an ethical center that holds our community together and the consequence of that is that we're fragmenting quite badly but what you see there is if that if you view someone with love then it's incumbent upon you to

treat them as if they're valuable and then the more you treat other people as if they're valuable the better person you are that just comes along for the ride in some sense so none of that seems questionable to me that that seems solid and so then maybe the more the more love you view other people with the higher the moral demand that's placed on you and then i would say too well then that's another reason why it's so important to be truthful and and in some sense to be good because it isn't obvious to me

that you can withstand that moral load if you're compromised by too much sin it's too much and then that's another thing that that we're not very good at teaching young people about you know we shouldn't do that you know it's like there's a sanctimonious authority that goes along with that that's the wrong tone it's more like [Music] you know i don't know how you lay it out properly but you tell people that you love how to avoid the road to hell and you don't do that because you're shaking your finger at them or because you're

a moral authority you do it because you don't want them to burn and i think there's too much of the moral authority still in the church and not enough of the you know the love that helps people avoid the fire tammy my wife has always taken the idea of truth very seriously her recent brush with death has deepened her religious sense and impelled her towards a life that's more consciously focused on service to others her family in particular but not only her family people beyond the family and i also think that's a function to some

degree of our stage of life she's a grandmother now and her children are grown and able to take care of themselves and so she can turn her attention to other people maybe farther afield from the immediate family i'm watching what she's doing and listening to her and watching her practical application of her faith and that affects me just as everything she does affects me because i watch what she does and take it seriously her recent actions have indicated she's had she's helped a number of people quite substantially the group that she's been communicating with and

all of that's very interesting to me she's showing me i mean i've taken the idea of god seriously for a very long time and i've said on multiple occasions that i try to act as though god exists and that that's essentially my definition of belief when people say do you believe in god belief is a multi-dimensional word and one question is well what do you mean by belief and for me the proof of belief is to be found in action and i decided that i would act as if god existed a long while back and

of course i'm imperfect in that inevitably now she's doing that more explicitly as well not she wasn't doing it quite well to begin with she's doing it more explicitly and also more within the confines of traditional religious conceptions although she's not attending church she's associating with a number of people who are formally religious and all of that's informing the way that she conducts herself it's watching her do that has also highlighted for me the missing praxis in western christianity if you want to be a christian let's say if you think that's necessary it's not exactly

obvious what you should do you should go to church but that's not enough i don't think i find it useful to contemplate the highest good on a continual basis i'm trying to keep myself oriented in that direction it's a religious orientation fundamentally it's an overwhelming orientation but there's no escaping the questions of the ultimate meaning of life [Music] i'm not an atheist anymore because i don't look at the world that way anymore i'm not a materialist anymore i don't think the world's made out of matter i think it's made out of what matters it's made

out of meaning what we orient towards unconsciously which means what captures our attention is meaning and it captures our attention before we know what it is the brain acts as if the world's made out of information or made out of meaning who would have the audacity to claim that they believed in god if they examined the way they lived who would dare say that to to believe you think to believe in a christian sense to actually this is why 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 that's an unbearable task in some sense to be able to accept the structure of existence the suffering that goes along with it and the disappointment and the betrayal and and to nonetheless act properly right to aim at the good with all your heart right to 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

that's what it means it doesn't 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 and so i've never been comfortable saying anything other than [Music] try to act as if god exists because god only knows what you'd be if you truly believed i mean if you think about it in some sense that's the central idea in christianity is 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 you know because maybe you're running at sixty percent or seventy percent or twenty percent and at cross purposes to yourself god only knows what you'd be if if you believed and so while i act i try to act like i believe but i'd never claim that i manage it so okay so you can think about christ

from a psychological perspective and the crit the critic my critic this particular critic that i've been reading said well that that doesn't differentiate christ much from a whole sequence of dying and resurrecting mythological gods and of course people have made that claim in comparative religion joseph campbell did that and jung to a lesser degree i would say but campbell did that but the difference and c.s lewis pointed this out as well the difference between those mythological gods and christ was that there's a there's a representation of there's a historical representation of his of of his

existence as well now you can debate whether or not that's genuine you can debate about whether or not he actually lived and whether there's credible objective evidence for that but it doesn't matter in some sense because this well it does but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter because there's still a historical story and so what you have in the figure of christ is an actual person who actually lived plus a myth and in some sense christ is the union of those two things the problem is is i probably believe that but i don't

know i don't i'm amazed at my own belief and i don't understand it like because i've seen [Music] sometimes the objective world and the narrative world touch you know that's union synchronicity and i've seen that many times in my own life and so in some sense i believe it's undeniable you know we have a narrative sense of the world for me that's been the world of morality that's the world that tells us how to act it's real like we treat it like it's real it's not the objective world but the narrative and the objective world

touch and the ultimate example of that in principle is supposed to be christ but i don't know what to and that seems to me oddly plausible but i still don't know what to make of it it's too head partly because it's too terrifying a reality to fully believe i don't even know what would happen to you if you fully believed it but are you a prophet see to say yes or no i have to think about how i think i have to think about how i might be conceptualized how what i'm doing might be conceptualized

no i think i see myself as a psychologist and fundamentally i am a psychologist i'm a behavioral psychologist and i'm very interested in i got very interested in psychoanalytic thinking especially the union variants and and i'm a professor and i'm doing that you know on a much larger stage let's say but that's really what i'm doing and so it's a combination of those two things and there's a i mean i speak about religious matters but i don't see myself as a religious leader i don't want to make that [Music] god left from me the intolerable

burden of my ignorance arrogance willful blindness bitterness and resentment as i pray that others rise above the same faults and temptations i watched fox news release a message this week there are terrible things afoot under the surface of our society and the perpetrators are coming for you and coming for us [Music] and then i watched the democrats respond in panic and anger saying there are terrible things afoot under the surface of our society and the perpetrators are coming for you coming for us are there terrible things afoot bubbling under the surface is something coming for

you and for us ask yourself how true that is of yourself and your own life have you addressed all that are you concerning yourself with the dust in your enemies eyes instead of attending to the filth that obscures your own sight do we want accusation suspicion discord derision and hatred or the peace and prosperity and happiness that beckons to us at this moment like never before who's the enemy here is it the basket of deplorables is it the freaks and the queers is it the plumbers and carpenters and tradesmen and managers who work honestly and

diligently during the day and the soldiers who stalwartly defend the borders and protect us is it the artists and visionaries whose expressions of unbridled creativity entertain and rejuvenate us and who continually offer to us an unending panoply of technological miracle is it the institutions that guide and protect us that so many lived and died to erect and establish which for all their faults have served us so well do we want revenge or justice do we want contempt or mercy do we want war or peace [Music] and what are you aiming at in your heart of

hearts [Music] i see even the best of men degenerating into the exchange of blows i see even the best of men identifying the enemy in our neighbors and friends i see even the best of men falling prey to cowardice and self-righteous anger it needs to stop i need to stop you need to stop before it's too late who is the enemy here the snake in your heart the lies on your tongue the arrogance of your intellect the cowardice of our refusal to see the enemy is that which divides to sow discord the enemy is the

pride and the fear that stops us from lending a hand across the divide the enemy is the great and eternal adversary of mankind and if we demonize our brothers our comrades in arms do we not precisely call that dread spirit forth have we not yet learned courage [Music] trust [Music] truth love even unto your enemy which is yourself [Music] god forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us may what is highest guide our vision may what is highest open our ears may what is highest guide our tongues and may we pray

fearful of the hell we could so easily and carelessly create deliver us from evil shine a light into the corners of our dark hearts for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen you