https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KUgkuNlfSQ0
When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he formulated another proposition. He said that we may have to become God’s merely to atone for the sin of deicide. And so he believed that the overman, the Superman, would be someone who, through the power of his own will, set his own values. Now I spent a lot of time reading Jung, Carl Jung, in relationship to Nietzsche. Jung, for example, published a, must be a, 1,500 page two volume book on the first third of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and was a very deep Nietzschean scholar, but fell under the influence of Freud, and this turned out to be of cardinal significance, because Freud was one of the first secular thinkers to note that in some unbelievably fundamental sense, we are not masters in our own house. There are sub-personalities within us, there are complexes within us, there are angels and demons within us, that’s another way of thinking about it, and they pull us this way and that, sometimes independent of our will, and often contrary to our will. And so Freud’s conclusion was, it’s very difficult for human beings to create their own values, because we have an intrinsic nature that’s not subject to our arbitrary will. And then Jung took that a step further, and he said, well, there’s no doubt that we act out a myth and a story, and that in the deepest sense, that has to be a theological story, and that the spirit that guides us has to have a unitary nature, which he did associate with Christ quite explicitly. And it’s a vicious rejoinder to the Nietzschean presumption that we can create and impose our own values. For the psychoanalysts, those values, and I would say for the wise clinicians, those values have to be discovered, not self-generated and imposed, plus you just don’t live long enough to do that, you’re just not wise enough to generate a whole system of universally applicable values out of whole cloth in the span of your trivial life. And if you know you’re doing that, then you reduce life to a game. You have created the meaning of life. Well, who is the creator? You? What gives you the right to do that? What gives you the power to do that? You did not create the universe. How can you write the laws of morality any more than you can write the laws of physics? In today’s world, we sometimes lose sight of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that built our society. This is why it is so important to study scripture and develop a dedicated prayer life. There’s no better way to do that than with Hallow. 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Go to hallow.com slash Jordan today. Well, it’s also, people find that shallow. You know, in my clinical work, I saw this time and time again. So if I was dealing with someone who was suffering, you know, maybe they had a tragedy in their own life, a medical tragedy or medical tragedy among members of their family, or maybe they had been subject to some really vicious, malevolent actors and they were despairing. They had to discover the values that would lift them out of that catastrophe. They couldn’t impose them. And it’s a real search. I think this is probably related to your work on prayer. It’s a real search. And one of the things I used to counsel my clients about, and I also built a program called Self-Authoring that helps people do this, and this is associated with that biblical injunction in the New Testament to knock and have the door open and to ask and to receive and to seek and to find is that you can have a dialogue, an interior dialogue that precedes something like this. And I think it’s a prayer, which is, okay, I understand because I’m reasonably mature that there is a tragic and malevolent element to life and it’s deep enough to destabilize me and to upset my faith in existence itself. Is there a path that I could walk down that would be so rich and meaningful that I would find the challenge of dealing with a tragedy and malevolence ennobling and worthwhile? And then it’s a search. You think, well, what would be of sufficient value to offer that possibility? And people find that in, they find it in love. They find it in family. They find it in friendship. They find it in sacrificial occupation, let’s say. They find it in beauty. But these aren’t created values. They’re discovered values. And then you bring yourself into alignment with them. That’s when you wrote your book on Islam. One of the things that you had to say about Islam that was very laudatory was that the Islamic people have appeared to do a better job of insisting that human beings are subordinate to the divine will in this sense, I think, in the best sense, in this sense of discovery that we’re talking about. Especially in Europe and North America, we have this obstacle about an obsession with freedom and a misunderstanding of freedom. We are not totally free. Our freedom in every sense is limited. We are finite. And we don’t like that. We want to play God with regard at least to freedom and autonomy. That’s maybe the biggest difference between modern Western civilization and all others in world history. We can think about that freedom because it isn’t. So let’s say, here’s the claim. I want to be free to do what I want. Okay, well hang on a sec. Which I are you talking about there? Are you talking about the mature I that sees next week and next month and next year and 10 years out and that takes the community into account? Or are you talking about the impulsive, hedonistic, self-serving, narrow I that just wants exactly what it wants right now? And what makes you think that when you make a case for that hedonism that you’re not just falling under the sway of an impulsive, short-sighted demon, so to speak? And then I used to play this game with my students when we were talking about ordered freedom and the notion that freedom itself has to be ordered. I think I mentioned earlier that when God calls his people out of tyranny, he says that they need to be free in order to serve him in the wilderness. Not to be free in some absolute sense. So I used to play a game with my students. I’d go up to one student, I’d say, do you want to play a game? Put him on the spot and he’d say yes. And I’d say, okay, you move first. And that would paralyze the student into absolute immobility because he was now faced with a plethora of choices so utterly broad that there was no pathway forward. And that was part of a discussion about the fact that if you look at music, for example, music operates by very sophisticated rules. And so it’s ordered and constrained. But out of that rules, system of rules, comes an almost infinite array of possibility. And so we have this sense, I think it derives from Rousseau, that any constraint of order is a limit on freedom. When what we should be hypothesizing is that with the optimal set of principles, you get the maximally desirable freedom. And it’s not freedom from everything and it’s not freedom to do anything. It’s certainly not a narrow hedonistic freedom because that backfires on you like the next day. Yes, if there is no world outside of Plato’s cave, then it is not freeing to escape from the cave. There’s certainly a great value to freedom. We must be free from everything that opposes us and restrains our better impulses. But that assumes that there’s a better and a worse. That assumes that there’s something like Plato’s, the good outside the cave. So you can be free from the shadows of the cave. And that notion of Freud’s, that there are a lot of people inside of us, good ones and bad ones. A little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us. So that it all becomes the worst of us to speak well of the best of us. That’s from Thornton Wilder, I think. That’s very helpful because when you talk to atheists, you’re talking to not just one person, but many persons. One of the things that shocked me the most in talking to atheists was that when I give them something like the argument from desire, don’t you at least wish there was a God? Don’t you at least see religion as an attractive fairy tale? Don’t you at least hope that it’s true, even though you don’t believe that it’s true? Almost always they say no. I don’t want there to be a God. I don’t want there to be a heaven. I would be threatened by that. And I think they’re suppressing something. I don’t think the human heart is that different between an atheist and a theist. The human heart was not designed at Harvard or Hollywood. It was designed in heaven. So we all want the thing we can’t define. We’re all mystics deep down. We want unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty. This is definitely the case. I mean, I would say in some sense by definition is that the most profound goods are reflected in the structure of the human heart. If people are striving forward, and I mean forward rather than downward, let’s say, forward and uphill, they are by definition pursuing something that’s a reflection of a transcendent good. It’s transcendent because if they already had it, which means it would be imminent, if they already had it, they wouldn’t have to pursue it. They posit something outside of themselves as better. And then the ultimate definition of that in some sense is the pursuit of the divinely good. And again, I see that as a matter of definition. And so now, you know, on the atheist front, I’ve read a lot of comments from atheists in my YouTube comment sections on my biblical lectures. I probably read at least hundreds of them and maybe thousands of them, but at least hundreds. And one of the things that has struck me continually is that many of the people who become atheists are reactionary. And I don’t mean that in a denigrating sense. A huge proportion of people who are stridently atheistic were hurt very badly by people who purported to be religious when they were young. And I think that also applies to Dawkins by the way, I’ve seen some evidence for that in his public utterances. And so you have people who’ve been terribly betrayed by the agents of what was supposed to be the best. And so they carry that utter bitterness with them, that ultimate betrayal. Because I think there isn’t anything worse in some sense than being betrayed by people who claim to be acting, let’s say in Christ’s name. I mean, how could anything be worse than that? And so then they’re driven to this atheism and they’re so afraid then again to reestablish a new faith because they’ve been hurt so badly that they’re willing to suffer this purgatorial drought of vision rather than to put themselves up on the chopping block one more time.