https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aSkGQ-241_M
as much as I believe in God, truly do. I have never found that arguments for God’s existence are nearly as effective or as important as arguments for God’s necessity. And that’s the point that I want to make here and we’re all making here. No God, chaos. You don’t believe in God, at least understand what the consequences of that non-belief are. What’s interesting about that is we keep having these conversations and the more that I’ve been thinking about this in relation to my forays into the political or cultural world, this is another consequence of how you align the moral with the strategic. And in some ways what you’re saying is if you make a moral argument, people don’t even know why they think what they think. So to come in and say to them, you need to change your moral outlook, what you’re suggesting is and why I think that’s more fruitful is it’s a strategic approach and that’s a way to lead people in and then they can decide how high up that hierarchy of understanding they want to move. Well, you can look at this purely psychologically, which I like to do as much as possible because I don’t think you should bring God into the issue unless you have to in some sense. You either are aiming for something unified, which means something at the pinnacle and something that’s the highest and superordinate and most valuable, or you’re not, in which case perhaps you’re aiming down or you’re aiming at a multiplicity of diverse things which are conflictual. Those are your options and we know that if your perception is fragmented and if your navigation is fragmented, which is a chaotic state, the consequence of that is anxiety and despair because that’s actually what anxiety and despair mark is that you’re confident and secure when you’ve reduced your plethora of potential passwages forward to one path. You know that if you’re in a vehicle, it’s like, well, are you going one place or ten? If you’re going ten, you can’t go anywhere and you’re confused. You have to be going one place and then everything snaps together and then your nervous system is literally regulated. Anxiety is the response to chaos, the a priori response to chaos. Can I ask Dennis a question? In light of that, so Dennis, you said earlier that the necessity of God is the necessity of belief in God is what’s going to restore us, what’s going to keep civilization on the right track. But is it enough to have a kind of psychological, just a psychological sort of stability, a belief that God might exist or that you should conduct yourself as if God is real, God exists, just as a kind of something that provides you with a kind of psychological unity and stability and order? Or do you think that a culture needs more than that? Is a kind of cultural religion, cultural Judaism, cultural Christianity enough? Well, mine’s not cultural. I’m not as nice as cultural is. But you seem to leave open that possibility. Yes. I wrestle with that and I have come down to the, I’ve come to the conclusion that I offered earlier. The number of people who believe in God and that God is meaningless is enormous. For most moderns, God is a celestial butler. This God here is my list of what I’d like you to do for me. Have a great day. I am, I am uninterested. I know this is almost heretical for many of my religious friends. I have asked God in my whole life twice for something, once that my mother not punish me for breaking the vase in the house, and then once as an adult. By the way, in both instances they were answered. It’s a little eerie for me who doesn’t ask him for anything. But in all seriousness, I am infinitely more interested in what God wants from me than what I want from God. And that’s the way I portray it to people. And they’re moved by that because they know God is not a celestial butler. The number of people who prayed for their dying child and the child died, everybody knows that that’s the case. So I am, I hate to use the term, I was going to say tired. Okay, I’m tired of people who say they believe in God but it doesn’t amount to anything. Why is God important? Changes minds. And you know, the founders of America, which I think is the greatest country ever founded, and it may fall over, we’re at a crisis point, they knew the importance. They were not all doctrinaire Christians. They were all, by the way, cultural Christians, clearly. But they were all very God-centered. Benjamin Franklin is considered a deist. If deist means Aristotle’s unmoved mover, none of the founders were deists. They believed in a God who acted in history. Jefferson, this is almost unknown to Americans, Jefferson and Franklin designed a great seal of the United States. You’ll find this fascinating. You know what it is? The Jews leaving Egypt. It was not, tragically, it was not adopted. Two of the least orthodox Christians, small o, wanted a biblical depiction to depict America. The Hebrews left Egypt, we left Europe. So they knew the importance of God and a lot of believers don’t. And so I just, I’m sorry for talking so long. No, no. So welcome back. John, can I? Thank you. Can I pick up on what Dennis is saying? Another aspect of the American Revolution. You probably know that at the defeat of Yorktown, the Hessian and British troops were ordered to play the ballad, The World Turned Upside Down, which was a 17th century ballad and came out of the English Revolution, which came out of the Torah. And the simple idea was it became various crazy things with the diggers and the levelers and so on. God had created order, humans had created disorder, so God, to create order again, turned the world the right way up and turned it upside down. And you have in Acts 17, these men who’ve turned the world upside down have come here and so on. And the original idea of revolution was actually biblical, although today it’s almost totally taken over by the left, reordering the world and putting it the right way up. Or again, you say repairing the earth? Yes, repairing the world under the rule of God, yeah. So we could say that you could ask the question not so much what do you have with God, you could reverse it in the Nietzschean sense. You could say what do you have without God? And then what you definitely have is you have no centralizing axis, you have no highest spirit in the highest place. And so psychologically that means chaos and confusion and internal conflict. And then you have no common spirit that unites you. And so then you have conflict. And so I would say that acting as if is the crucial issue. And I was going over that this morning in a class I was doing on the Sermon on the Mount. And Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount the ordering of his ethical injunction is something like do and then teach. But it’s in that order. But it’s not do only and it’s not teach only, it’s do and then teach. And so you could say you have this internal mimicry of the Father, the Holy Spirit, let’s say the revolutionary spirit in the proper sense. And then you can communicate descriptions of that spirit. And that’s the religious enterprise. And we confuse that I would say in some sense with descriptions of external reality. They’re not the same thing. The religious enterprise is the description of the animating spirit and the proper animating spirit. And that’s why even in the Exodus story, God is presented as the spirit that calls the hero to lead his people out of slavery. It’s not a description of the world. It isn’t that the idea that there’s wisdom in the world isn’t there. But that’s not the superordinate idea. And so I think you need both. You have to have the acting as if. That’s the primary thing because otherwise you’re a hypocrite. The most famous philosopher of the as if is Immanuel Kant of the 18th century. I mean, just the great kind of father of the enlightenment. And he’s often thought to be somebody who does away with God. He’s a kind of precursor to nature in lots of ways. There was a poet called Hyna who said that Kant was much more devastating than Robespierre because whereas Robespierre just decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God. But I think he had this idea that we can’t know that God exists. We can’t have theoretical knowledge that God exists. But we must so conduct ourselves in the ethical life as if God exists. Because as free beings, that’s the primacy of pure practical reason. So we know its reality as free agents. So you could say in a way that Kant is not actually claiming that, I mean, I think Hyna is completely wrong about this, but that God is just a regulative as if, as of. But rather he is criticizing a notion that, a sort of Aristotelian platonic notion, we can know God by contemplating some abstract object. And he’s saying no, we have contact, we have contact with numeral reality. We have contact with the divine as free agents. So when we obey the categorical imperative, which he thinks is intrinsically linked to the idea of God, that’s the kind of knowledge. We saw that echoed with Moses. I mean, Moses walks by the burning bush, but as we all noted, he does turn to notice. And so I would say we do have access to experience of God if we pay enough attention. And we pay enough attention to the things that in some sense transcend our current parochial conceptualizations. I mean, I think you’re quite Kantian in, I think, your approach, Jordan, in the sense that you attend to the structures of subjectivity and the structures that are uncovered by psychoanalysis and psychology. But you’re also, I think, more, and this is a development, I think, this is, I’ve not really heard you talk like this until quite recently, this notion of transcendence, not kind of divine transcendence, but somehow that the world beyond the world as it is, as it’s given morality as well, pierces through those, those, that kind of, your kind of psychological wrapping. I think that that’s a development in your thought.