https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u5Tl8txtD3k
But hello, everybody. I am very excited to be here with Christopher Kaysor and Matthew Petruszek. They are the authors of the recent book, Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity, The Search for a Meaningful Life, which is published by Word on Fire, Bishop Barron’s organization. And so I’m really happy to have them here. I have the book right here. I’ve been diving into it, looking into it, seeing the different approaches and different arguments. So I’m happy to have some time with them to explore why they wrote this, what are they hoping to accomplish, and a few of the main points that they’re trying to make. [“JORDAN PETRUSZEK, GOD AND CHRISTOPHER PAYNE”] This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. [“JORDAN PETRUSZEK, GOD AND CHRISTOPHER PAYNE”] So Christopher and Matthew, thank you for coming on. Maybe introduce yourselves a little bit. Tell me what your background is and moving up to why it is that you even thought of writing such a book right now. Sure. So I’m a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. And I teach a lot of courses that are related to subjects in faith and reason. So I actually teach a course called The Search for a Meaningful Life. And I teach a lot of courses that are related to subjects in faith and reason. And I teach a course called The God of Faith and Reason. And one of the big issues that comes up with my students again and again is how to reconcile Genesis with contemporary science. So I have many students that are troubled by this, students who see the attractiveness of Christian faith and then worry, well, I’m going to have to jettison all contemporary knowledge about how things evolved and whatever. So for years now, I’ve been trying to show students that if we put Genesis back in its proper context and read it as a creation narrative that’s a rival to other creation narratives, that actually there’s no difficulty at all in reconciling a proper understanding of Genesis with contemporary science and evolution and things like that. So I’ve been doing that for a long time. But then I ran across Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Genesis. And I have to say, even though I had read Genesis many, many times, I was really struck and learned a ton from his own interpretation of the text. And so I really became quite fascinated with his work and looked at his writings and also the videos that he’s done on other topics. And what I was struck by really was, in my way of thinking about it, a continual effort to put contemporary science in dialogue with this rich faith tradition. And I love that because part of my background is studying Thomas Aquinas. He’s one of my great heroes. And Aquinas was all about bringing together what was for him at the time, contemporary science, that is the writings of Aristotle, with the wisdom of the Christian tradition, people like John Chrysostom, people like Augustine of Hippo. And what Thomas wanted to do is bring these into fruitful dialogue. And that’s what I try to do in my own philosophical work. So I saw Peterson’s work really as another way and a very exciting way of engaging in this dialogue between faith and reason. So that kind of sparked my interest in Peterson and led me to write about Peterson and then eventually to co-author this book. And so Matthew, you wrote the 12 rules part, not so much the biblical lectures part. So what it is that brought you to such a venture yourself? Well, I did my, I’m also a professor of theology, just right down the hall from Chris at Loyola Marymount University. And I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago. And it rightly has the reputation of doing a really rigorous, maybe even suspicious analysis of the category of religion. And so it’s a very sort of hard knock intellectual environment. And so when I first got this job, I thought, oh, I’m prepared to be able to speak to students who may have some reservations about religion in general and Christianity in particular. And I realized within the first semester that my estimation of where young people are, where the culture is generally, was way off. I couldn’t even assume for example, that students knew that the Bible is composed for Christians of the Old Testament, the New Testament. That was one assumption I learned the first day of class. So ever since that it’s been about seven years, I’ve been looking for ways to retool, to make religion first accessible and then second relevant. And I’ve been experimenting with different literature and different approaches. But when I encountered Jordan Peterson’s work and then saw the effect that it was having, I thought, this is it. And I’ve actually been able to test it in the classroom and sure enough, the kind of response he gets online is also happening in the classroom as well. So for that reason, I began engaging his work. And I also, because I was giving it such a close engagement, started to look at not only areas of overlap, but also what I thought were some significant gaps or areas in his thought that a substantive Christian theism could actually fix. And so I’m curious about Matthew, what it is, like what it is about his approach that you thought was in terms of Christianity, in terms of a way of living, what do you thought was so close or what would enliven these young Christian students that you had? Well, if I could play sort of armchair psychologist, which is dangerous to do and we’re talking about Jordan Peterson, I think that we’re at a point now where the experiment of secularism is not only beginning to fail, but really failing. And students are young people, especially, are bearing the brunt of that. When I think back to my own youth, my own coming of age, and when I have that long commute into work, often listening to music from the 90s, now it’s considered classic rock in some circles, which is scary. But I see the culture beginning to experiment with this kind of mischievous nihilism already. But around it, people were still basically believers in a generic sense. It was still propping up the idea that life is meaningful, that there is purpose, that there is a structure to life in general, to your particular existence that will hold you up. So we could afford, the culture could afford to have these pockets of mischievous nihilism. Well, I think it’s fair to say those pockets have now become the dominant form, and things are falling apart. Across the board, we see things are falling apart. So I think that there’s this hunger, even if it’s not explicitly articulated by most, a hunger for rules, and then for rules that actually have depth, meaning, purpose, and truth. Yeah, there’s something funny about the situation. When, what happens when, you know, when the world is ordered, you have room for a clown, let’s say, and kind of people poking at the order. But when the world is upside down, and everything is clownish, and everything’s a carnival, yeah, what do you do? And then people who tell you to stand up straight and pull up your pants, you come, whoa, like this is, what is this? Like, what is this? Put on your pants and then pull them up. Just put them on, yeah, just that. A lot to start with. And so Christopher, in terms of Genesis, I think that for sure my own interest with Jordan is far more in that area. You know, like, I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t actually read 12 Rules for Life. But I really, his work on the relationship between cognitive science and kind of evolutionary biology and the manner in which to read Genesis, you know, this idea of perception and the problem of multiplicity, this is what has kind of interested me the most with Jordan, what got me excited about the manner in which he talks about it. And so what is it about the way he talks about Genesis, which you found connects so much to the Christian tradition? Well, I would say, in a weird way, the most basic thing was something I never noticed until Jordan Peterson pointed it out to me. And that was that God creates through rational speech. So in some of these rival creation stories, the gods have a big battle, a big war. And then the universe is fashioned out of the, basically, a battlefield remains of this sort of inter, what would you say, this war among the gods. And what Jordan points out, which again, it’s weird that I never noticed this, but that God says, let there be light. And if you think about rational speech, rational speech can only arise from some kind of reasoner. You can’t have rational speech just from a duck quacking or a tree falling over and making noise. If it’s a rational speech, there is a mind behind it. And so the universe arises from this rational speech and reflects a rational mind. And that God repeatedly does this and then says, and it was good. That’s another really key point, because some of these rival myths thought of the created order as actually evil. That to have a body, for example, would be seen as a bad thing and an evil thing that we should transcend. And rather than view creation and the human body as good, these other stories would say, no, no, you’re trapped in your body. Your body, like Plato would say, your body’s a prison that traps your soul. And I think in the Christian tradition, there’s this emphasis on the goodness of creation and an emphasis on the goodness of the human body. And so again, Jordan sort of highlighted these things. And I had heard the stories before, but Sister Mount never registered with me properly and he really made it register with me properly. So I was very grateful for those insights. And then the more I thought about those sorts of insights about how human beings are made in the image of God and therefore we too express ourselves through rational speech. I mean, Jordan really brought that out in a really beautiful way. So I guess what I was trying to do in the book is connect Peterson’s interpretations of Genesis with some of these older classic interpretations of Genesis that you find in people like Origen and St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and others. And again, I found this big overlap. And in some respects, I thought that these classic thinkers could really contribute and augment what Peterson was saying and bring him kind of further down the road. So in the book, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do is say, this is great, we’re moving in a good direction. But if we look at these classic writers, we can go even further and even deeper. Yeah, I think that your point about the goodness of creation is a huge thing that seems to come up time and time again in Jordan, which is even though sometimes you wonder if he really believes in the goodness of the world, he realizes that just like his proposition about God, that if you act as if the world is good, then the fruits of that will be something. If you act as if the world is inherently bad, then you can also see what the fruits are. And it’s interesting because in the past maybe 20 years or so, there’s been a resurgence of Gnosticism in the popular culture. There’s been in even in universities, this idea that the Gnostics were the real Christians and that Orthodoxy was just suppressed all these marginal voices of Christianity. You have this narrative, which is there. And it’s fascinating to notice that as we kind of see postmodernism play itself out, we’re seeing in these transhuman moves and in these, even in the digital space and this obsession with the digital space, something like a kind of soft Gnosticism where we believe that we can exist only in these kind of subtle bodies on screen and that our actual physical bodies are something of a obstacle to our ideal existence, whether it’s even in the whole gender, sexual identity thing, but also in other even weirder tropes, like the fashion for furries and all that kind of weird stuff where people kind of project themselves into avatars and things like that. So I think that Jordan, even in his own persona as this kind of greedy, grounded guy, he doesn’t anymore, but he used to wear cowboy boots. That was something about, he has this sense that he’s actually kind of standing on the ground and speaking to you from that space. I really think so. And also the same with what you’re saying, there’s something when Jordan’s talking about scripture that you’re like, and then, oh no, it’s like, you’re like, yes, yes. And then, I don’t know, I’m not sure. Here’s when things start to get a little soggy, but his genuineness, I think, is part of the attraction too. Like he’s so genuine in his desire to kind of plunge in and to know more and to move these things around and to try to see how they can connect to contemporary issues of psychology and how we live in the world. I think that goes a lot to why people are interested. Sometimes the Christian scholar especially speaks from a voice in which you feel almost as if this has nothing to do with reality. Like this is, when you’re talking about Genesis, it has nothing to do with your life. It has nothing to do with how you live in the world. So why would you even care about these old stories, especially if they sound so foreign to our materialist thinking, let’s say. Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. I think that is part of the draw of Peterson’s presentation, in particular when he’s actually talking, hearing him talk. So when you see him, and I’ve seen him live twice, when you see him give a talk, especially live, there really is a sense that he is thinking through these issues. He’s trying to figure out what’s true. And you probably notice sometimes he’ll just stop and it’ll be like just, you know, be three, four seconds. And you’re like, God, did he have a stroke? I mean, I’m worried about the guy. What happened here? He’s still thinking about it. He’s just sort of collecting his thoughts and trying to pick exactly the right word. And for me, I appreciate that. I think that’s great. I mean, he’s sort of the exact opposite of a White House press secretary that spits out the talking points of the day. And there’s no relationship between those talking points or very little relationship between those talking points and the reality of what’s actually happening. Just, you know, so I love, for me, that’s a huge part of the draw, that there’s a kind of honesty, a searching quality to it. And, you know, if you’re gonna search, you know, sometimes you’re gonna not find what you want or go in the wrong direction, but, you know, I think we’re all in a search. I mean, maybe my questions are slightly different than Jordan’s, but, you know, I’m still searching. I’m still trying to grow and move forward. And I love that about him. And for me, frankly, that’s pretty inspiring. I think, well, look, if I can spend my life on a search for the true, the good, and the beautiful, and trying to live in accordance with the true, the good, and the beautiful, well, then I would think my life is gonna be pretty meaningful and I’m gonna live a pretty good life. And there’s something about that, which people have a vision, let’s say, of the middle ages or kind of middle age thinking of this very rigid and solid way of presenting things. But when you look at how actually things were done with the contestations in the universities, you know, students would bring up questions. There would be this lively debate that would be go on for multiple days, you know, where students would just try to find arguments to kind of, to destroy their teacher. The teacher would say, like, find all the arguments you can to try to destroy my argument. And then it would be this like back and forth thing. It was far more dynamic and far more engaged than what we tend to think of today. 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 thing, the biggest issue that keeps coming up with Jordan. And he says he doesn’t believe in God, 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 Peterson’s use of that trope, I act as if God exists, is actually something that Pope Benedict, Pope Benedict Emeritus encouraged as a model 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 live and to act as if God exists. And so 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 ultimately, it has a formal structure to it, but it’s substantively empty because it’s hard to have a relationship with the hypothetical. And ultimately, Christianity is about a relationship. Those are also words from Pope Benedict. It’s not about a set of propositions or a set of ideas, it’s about a relationship with Jesus Christ. And so 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 lawgiver and judge. It also misses the grace. It misses the love, it misses the mercy, it misses the best part of the Christian story. It might get the crucifixion, but it misses the resurrection. And so I think for those reasons, it’s just not enough theologically, philosophically, but I also would say therapeutically, it’s not enough. Because when things get dark enough, a hypothetical is not gonna carry you through. It’s just not going to do it. You’re going to have to walk to jump to the other, you’re going to have to have the courage to push through to the other side into an actual relationship of faith. No, I think your point about grace is the most important point, because for all my love of Jordan, we see that the God that he says he acts as if exists is an ideal, is a judge, is a logos, is something towards which all reality tends, but acts as this overbearing model. That you have to conform to. And then this sense that you can’t, right? 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 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 absolute is calling you, right? Is always kind of calling you, and 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 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 God. And so my biggest, there’s an interesting thing going on too with Jordan, and I don’t know if you commented on it, either of you, but Tammy, his wife, is very much closer to Christianity, although she’s not yet going to any church. She has been praying the rosary every day for several years. She attributes her healing to a miracle that she experienced in the hospital. I’m actually doing a series with her right now, going through the symbolism of the rosary, and which she wants to put up as a podcast, on her own terms. And now we’ve heard also that Michaela, his daughter is saying that she found God. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it’s an interesting situation in general to watch how Jordan seems to have been this bridge towards Christianity for many, many people, and it’s a bridge that he himself has not crossed yet. So I don’t know if it’s something that you’ve thought about in the writing of this book. Yeah, a little bit, and actually kind of after writing of the book. So one of the important things about Mary, it seems to me, and Jesus is if Jesus is just a myth or an ideal, an ideal or a myth doesn’t need an actual mother, but Jesus was not merely an ideal or merely the archetype, but was actually a flesh and blood real human being. And so he had a real mother. And so I think in a way, the practices, like saying the rosary are incredibly important for living as if God exists. So I think that there’s something incredibly important about living as if God exists, and I try to do that too. And there is always a gap between my ideals of how to live, to love God perfectly and the reality of what I actually do. But part of the way of easing this gap, it seems to me, is recognizing that it’s God’s help that helps us to cut down on the gap between the ideal and the real. And part of that mercy is the impetus to prayer. So when we pray, it seems to me what we’re doing is enhancing that relationship and moving towards ourselves transforming into being more like how we ideally wanna be. And so, yeah, I’m very happy to hear these encouraging developments about his wife saying the rosary, and I hadn’t heard about his daughter, but I think all that is really to the good. So if we act as if God exists, the next thing to ask, I think, would be, well, has God given any sort of revelation about how he wants us to live? And Jordan’s answer to that seems to be more or less that, yeah, Jesus really is somehow the ideal and teaches us something really important about how to live. But then if that’s true, and we look at the gospels, Jesus clearly talked about a church and talked about the importance of baptism and talked about all of these things that Christians are supposed to do to serve the poor and to love their neighbor, to forgive their enemies and pray for their enemies. And so I think the next stage would be, well, look, if we try to live as if God exists, we try to follow the teachings of Jesus, well, then the next stage might be, well, we should join a church, we should pray, we should love our enemies, we should serve the poor, we should develop a life of prayer and then continue moving forward. And this way of, it’s not really an intellectual way, it’s almost by practice, that you grow, not so much through just thinking, but also through living, through actual the practice of prayer, the practice of penance, the practice of serving others. And so that can be, and for most people is, a very viable path to God. Yeah. One of Jordan’s main points has been the idea that, let’s say, consciousness and perception is embodied and that it is very much embodied. That is the way that we actually address the world is always through this embodied judging or evaluating of how things present themselves to us. And this, if you take that a little further, we realize that what it necessitates is, it necessitates something like ritual. There’s no doubt about it. That is that if the world is teleological, the way it presents itself to us and we have to deal with it in terms of our purposes, then there are ways to deal with them properly and there are ways to deal with it which lead to death. And that scales into social interactions, right? We have ways of interacting with each other which are ritualized and are not arbitrary. And that continues to stack up. It’s all of a sudden, even within this very secular way of describing the world, things like baptism, things like communion, things like coming together, singing, church buildings, all the kind of stuff that the modern demythologize, I can’t ever say that word, demythologizing Christian, wanted to slowly eradicate, all suddenly kind of flood back in. And I think that even at the end of his own argument, Jordan at some point has to go to church. Like it has to become embodied. You can’t just be talking about embodiment, but there has to be a stacking up of how things come together in community. Like you said, all of this is well and good until you have someone sitting in the pew next to you that you really find annoying and that just gets on your nerves all the time. And now you’re faced with them and you have to talk with them and you have to go up to the communion chalice at the same time, knowing that you’re all part of this body. So Matty, I don’t know if you have some thoughts on these last few points about Jordan as a bridge and all of this towards Christianity. Yeah, one of the, again, through practice, having had the opportunity to teach Peterson’s work a few times, one of the elements of his thought that students, I think, react to most positively is his claim in 12 Rows for Life that you have a nature. It comes to them as if it’s like revelation, as if it’s prophetic, that there is a way of being that is particular to who you are as a human being. And I think that one of the reasons why that’s so revolutionary for those who have been seeded and brought up in secular culture, so it’s all they know, it’s all they know, they don’t have a reference point, is it’s liberating. Because if it’s true, and it is true, that we do have a nature, that we are made in a particular kind of way, then the whole life project shifts from one of self-creation where we are not only like a stone carver who gets to create our own life, but we are the stone itself, we’re the quarry, we’re the hammer, we’re the chisel, we’re absolutely everything. So we’re not working with something, we are everything that we work with at the same time. Which is, even at the most superficial level, impossible to do well because you have no reference points whatsoever. You’re operating a vacuum. It’s at best exhausting, at worst tragic and catastrophic. So to hear that we actually have a nature and the life project shifts from acting in accordance with a general pattern of being that is ultimately good resets their horizon of what is possible. Then on top of that, if you can build into that notion of creation, this sacramentality and this incarnational understanding of God being present in bodies, in matter, in stuff, well then there you go. You’ve got a good religion at that point. And you also have Orthodox Christianity as well. Pretty much, yeah, pretty much. I wanna ask the big question, in the last few months, Jordan has really been talking a lot about psychedelics. He’s had quite a few experts, some people even claiming that the original Eucharist would have been hallucinogen. You can feel by my tone what I think of this stuff. But I wanted to know, but this is a big deal. I don’t wanna also make a negative people’s reaction via the way people are dealing with this, even in my own, the own people that watch my videos. This is a big thing because this is coming back into culture. And Jordan also seems to be, if not encouraging it, talking a lot about it in ways that will encourage it, whether he wants to or not. What do you see to be the difference? Or maybe you don’t, but what do you see to be the difference between this vision of spirituality, which is this taking of or having spiritual experiences, seeing the sky open up, having all these types of experiences and the spirit, the Christian walk, like the Christian transformation? Yeah, I think one way of thinking about it would be the difference between kind of selfish orientation versus a kind of altruistic orientation. So if I take drugs, especially hallucinogens, I’m cutting myself off from reality and I’m having my own kind of private experience. But insofar as I’m cut off from reality, that makes it much more difficult, at least when I’m cut off, to really love God, to really love other people, and even really to love myself. And the reason is that real love has to be based on reality. Real love is based on truth. If I want to, if we think of love as willing the good of the other for their sake, in order for me to do that, I have to know truly who this other person is, and I have to know the truth about what is actually good for this person. And even loving myself, if I’m gonna love myself properly, I have to know the truth about who I am and the truth about what would actually be good for me. So insofar as I am on LSD or something and I’m detached from reality, that obscures my ability to know the truth about myself, the truth about other people, and the truth about God. So I think the Christian view- Let me just be fair for the people taking it. I’ve never taken hallucinogens, but let me be fair to their argument, which is that what they say is that when you do take it, it’s the opposite which happens. What you encounter is more reality. As you see the reality more, you see a deeper reality of yourself, you see a deeper reality of the world, and you also see a deeper reality of others. So a lot of people, it’s not always the case, but some people, like Sam Harris, for example, says that his whole spiritual journey started when he took DMT, I think, and then all of a sudden he felt this deep love, like this overwhelming love for his friend that he couldn’t explain that was so completely taking him over, and that when he finished his trip, then he wanted more of that, like he just wanted more of that. So I just wanna be fair to the psychedelics people. Yeah, yeah, no, that’s fair enough, that’s fair enough. And I haven’t taken LSD either, so I can’t comment one way or the other. But I guess if we move off Harris’s insight, there is something beautiful and wonderful about feeling love for other people. That’s terrific. But at the end of the day, I’d say the Christian ideal is not so much feeling and emotion, but being a certain kind of person. And because you’re a certain kind of person, you act in a certain kind of way. So the Christian ideal, it seems to me, is Jesus, and it ultimately is about love. And love, at the end of the day, it seems to me in this fallen world, is gonna involve suffering. So in a way, the opposite of feeling good is gonna involve, in some cases, feeling a great deal of suffering. And again, that’s not the end of the story. The Christian story is that the suffering of Jesus wasn’t the end, that he did suffer grievously, but that the story continues, and we have the resurrection, we have that great joy. And I think that my way of thinking about it at least is that the goal of my life should not be to feel a certain way or to have certain experiences, but the goal of my life should be love. I should try to love God, I should try to love other people, I should try to love myself properly. And I will have deep, important experiences and deep feelings if I do that. I mean, the more I love other people, the more I care about them, the more I have a feeling of love towards them. So feelings are important, I’m not denying that, but I think that if we put feelings in the first place and chase after feelings, I think that’s gonna get us into trouble. I think the better way to move is to try to love, and if we do try to love others authentically, I think we will, in a very natural way, have very deep, important, and positive experiences with these people. Yeah, I think you’ve got exactly the right point, at least in my perception, which is that it really is a difference between experience in a passive way and embodied practice in the other, which is that the difference between receiving an experience and just kind of having it and then actually walking on a road and being transformed as you walk on this path. And I think that that’s, it seems that, well, you can be tricked to believe one is the other because you have this elated experience of reality and you get a sense that you pierce the veils and the mysteries that are holding the world together. You think that somehow that’s you, and then when you’re done, you go back to your miserable little life and you don’t necessarily realize that when it hits the road, loving your neighbor doesn’t, like you said, mean feeling all these things about it. It means actually engaging with them in a certain way, which includes self-sacrifice and includes all of this. And so I totally agree. Even in the mystical tradition of the Christian church, like in the Orthodox tradition, you have a sense in which these mystics, they have these crazy spiritual experiences, like all these very similar to the ones people have on these drugs, but they tell you, ignore those experiences. Don’t, they’ll happen, just let them go, actually. Let them go, don’t bother with them because that’s not your goal. Your goal is not to have these. Your goal is to become in the image of God. Your goal is to become like Christ, not to just have these experiences. So Matthew, I don’t know if you have some thoughts on this same subject. Yeah, it’s cheating. It’s cheating, pure and simple. I mean, you can win by cheating, but you’ve still cheated. And so if it’s true that God exists, and I think that God does exist, and if it’s true that Jesus Christ is the son of God, which I believe to be true, then that’s the ultimate cheat. You want the resurrection without the cross. And Jesus is very, very clear that that is not the way to go, that that is the way to perdition, not to salvation. And I think that’s not because that’s just the way that God has happened to rig the system, that you have to suffer in order to make it, but that’s just the nature of real transformation, of real individual transformation, is if you’re not capable of saying yes to God, of saying yes to Christ in the middle of the darkness, if you need the trip in order to say yes to God, well, then you don’t love God, you love yourself. And you’ve just now participated in a mystical delusion of what’s ultimately just an expression of self-love. So it’s, I mean, I even have trouble- What you’re saying is so interesting, because Jordan had this interview with this mushrooms guy. And it was some guy who was saying, I forget what his name is, he was saying that all religion was based on mushrooms. And he was interviewing this other person, who was obviously someone who had done a lot of mushrooms, like a lot of psychedelics. And they talked about it for two hours. And then finally Jordan asked this person, and I’m sorry if he ever watches this, but he asked this person, so what is it about? Until now, they’re just talking about the actual mushrooms. It’s hard for me to even focus that long on something like that. But then they come to saying, what is it about? What’s behind all of this? And the man answers something like, you realize that after you’ve been all through this, like you’ve gone through, you realize that God doesn’t exist and it’s just you. And I was like, yeah, that’s it. Solipsism is the final solution. And when I say solipsism, it’s really is like, yeah, you need to understand what the consequences of solipsism are, I’m not just being a religious rigorous and saying it’s wrong. Like they’re actual fruits of solipsism and they look like our world today. And so that’s the end of this stuff, is something like solipsism. Yeah, and you think of Dante’s Inferno, right? The people that are in the deepest part of hell are frozen in ice. So it’s sort of like an image of solipsism, right? They’re just inward, just themselves, no actual contact with another person. That is, at least for Dante, the very worst ending situation, right? To be in the pit of hell, which is not for him fire, but to be totally encased in ice. Yeah, exactly. All of Dante’s hell until then is about love. It’s all about love, but it’s about ill-placed love and misplaced love. But then when he gets to the deepest pit, it’s like when the love is gone, then that’s it. All that’s left is these frozen, these undynamic realities that can’t transcend themselves into others. And so- It’s just the flip side of that kind of ecstasy is despair. I mean, and it’s paper thin of one side to the other. Because if you end up by yourself and that’s all there is, that’s also hell, absolute terror. And the idea that this would be used as a therapeutic to help people cope with reality, it’s awful. It’s awful. I can’t stress how much, if anybody’s watching this who’s thinking about experimenting with drugs as a way of dealing with depression or anxiety, please don’t. You will end up alone in hell. Matthew, can you tell us what you really think? You’re holding back. And I’m unclear. I know, it’s like, can you be any clearer there, Matthew? All right, all right. So I think on that last little moment of passion, I think we can finish this. Because everybody, check out the book, Jern Peterson, God and Christianity. You can find it everywhere. And it’s also one more of the great things that Word on Fire is doing, all the work they’re doing with connecting to the secular world. And so maybe you can finish in telling me a little bit about the reaction you’ve had from the book and then we’ll finish there. So please tell me a bit about how people are reacting to it. I think the reaction that I’ve had at least has been very positive. I’ve had actually the opportunity to go to the Vatican and they gave a copy of the book to the Pope. He seemed very happy about it. I don’t know, now does he know Jordan Peterson? I’m not sure, but he seemed delighted with it. But in terms of people who had actually read the book, I’ve been very encouraged on Amazon at least. The last time I checked, there were about 70 reviews already. And I think it was 4.8 out of five stars or something. So that’s like, that’s really good, I think. So I think that I’ve been very happy with the reaction so far. I have as well. There is, speaking personally, there is a kind of evangelical aspiration in this book that I think it makes fair to say for Chris as well. Now we hope this book not only shows the Christians how Peterson I think is an ally and a true ally and a very robust ally, but also those coming from the Petersonian side as it were, who may be interested in Christianity because of him, that there is a way, there is an ending to this story that illuminates the whole story and puts a foundation beneath it and makes it a true adventure. And so I’m hoping that the book has that effect with some people and it appears it might be. All right, well, thank you for doing this. Thank you for your book and looking forward to seeing how people react to all this. All right, everybody, check out the book. Thank you for your attention and we’ll talk to you very soon.