https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=rPm0JSkPNvA
And so Matthew, I guess the big question for you is what do you make of the whole, I act as if God exists thing because that seems to be the biggest, the biggest thing, the biggest issue that keeps coming up with Jordan, and he says he doesn’t believe in God but he acts as if God exists. How do you make of that in terms of how it connects to Christianity or how it goes away from it or how do you see that? I think in a, the book actually points out that, that Peterson’s use of that of that trope, I act as if God exists is actually something that that Pope Benedict, Pope Benedict emeritus encouraged as a model for, for Europe and its waning relationship with Christianity, saying at least can we agree that it’s all things considered it’s preferable for us to to live and to act as if God exists and so I think, I think we can get a lot of mileage out of that. Especially given the current state of the culture. At the same time, I think it’s, it’s ultimately, it has formal, a formal structure to it but it’s substantively empty, because it’s hard to have a relationship with a hypothetical. And ultimately, Christianity is about a relationship that those are also words from from Pope Benedict, it’s not about, it’s not about a set of propositions or a set of ideas it’s about a relationship with Jesus Christ. And so you you may get something but it will be a pittance of the actual reality that’s behind it, if we only act according to the idea that there may be some some lawgiver and and judge. It also misses the grace, it misses the, it misses the love it misses the mercy it misses the best part of the Christian story. It gets maybe that it might get the crucifixion but it misses the resurrection. And so I think for for those reasons, it’s just, it’s not enough, theologically philosophically but I also would say therapeutically. It’s not enough, because when things get when things get dark enough, a hypothetical is not going to carry you through, it’s just not going to do it. You’re going to have to walk to jump to the other, I don’t like that word jump you’re going to have to have the courage to push through to the other side into an actual relationship of faith. So I think your point about grace is the most important point because you know for all my love of Jordan, we see that he, the guy that he says he acts as if exists is an ideal right as a judge is a logos is is something towards which all reality depends but acts as as this overbearing, you know, model that you have to conform to. And then this sense you know the sense that you can’t write that it actually becomes a weight on you like this pressure that makes you suffer because you see it and you want to act in conformity to it but you always fail. And so, you know, it’s actually kind of, it’s actually not funny but it’s kind of the strangeness which is that the whole point of Christianity right is that this, this absolute is calling right is always kind of calling it is the source of reality and always calling reality back into himself. And without that, even the theory, even his theory about how the world exists to me seems to not seems to fall apart because there’s something even behind that that seems to, even in his idea of perception and this notion of multiplicity there seems to be a sense in which you have to get it. You have to understand how it’s always there’s always this kind of calling in right this bringing the world, even as a person kind of into yourself. And so if you stack that up into higher beings then you end up with something like, like God. And so, you