Jordan Peterson: 'The Bible is more than just true,' it's the bedrock of civilization
World-renowned Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson said the Bible is “way more than just true,” it's the bedrock of Western civilization.
Peterson appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience” Tuesday, where he lamented that “the culture is dissolving" as he detailed his experience touring the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and his reflections on society.
“Roughly speaking, we have a bedrock of agreement,” he said. “That’s the Bible, by the way.”
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Peterson elaborated on how he came across this realization as he walked through the museum, noting that one floor is dedicated to the “history of the book.”
“For a while, literally, there was only one book and that book was the Bible,” he said. After a while, there were “all sorts of books that anybody could buy,” he added, stressing that “all those books in some sense emerged out of that underlying book [the Bible].”
Later in the discussion, Peterson spoke more about Western civilization, characterizing “fundamental texts” as “the texts upon which most other texts depend.” He cited the work of William Shakespeare as one of several “texts that influenced more other texts” before identifying the Bible as the ultimate source of all “linguistic production.”
“It isn’t that the Bible is true. It’s that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth, which makes it way more true than just true. It’s a whole different kind of truth. And I think this is not only literally the case. Factually, I think it can’t be any other way. It’s the only way we can solve the problem of perception.”
Throughout his appearance on the podcast, Peterson spoke about what he saw as the decline of Western civilization. He specifically pointed to the obsession with gender as a sign of civilizational collapse, which caught the ire of the far-left progressive activist group Media Matters, which frequently demands that advertisers boycott conservative news commentators.
The conversation about gender began when Rogan brought up remarks by Douglas Murray, associate editor of The Spectator and author of The Madness of Crowds, who also contends that civilization is collapsing. Rogan noted that in a previous episode of his show, Murray observed that when societies start collapsing, “they become obsessed with gender.”
“He was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks,” Rogan continued.
Peterson expanded on that assertion, contending that “It’s not so much an obsession with gender, it’s a disintegration of categories as a precursor ... like so it’s a marker for — if categories just dissolve, especially fundamental ones, the culture is dissolving.” From there, he and Rogan began to engage in the conversation about the Bible.
At another point in the podcast, Rogan asked Peterson: “What do you think it means when someone is so attracted to the idea that they were born in the wrong body … that they’re willing to go through surgery?”
Peterson responded by saying, “A lot of the people who are manifesting serious issues with gender identity are on the autistic spectrum.” He further likened the widespread phenomenon of people identifying as transgender to the “satanic ritual abuse allegations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.” Peterson attributed the aforementioned hysteria to “women going into the workforce en masse, leaving their children with strangers and starting to have pathological fantasies about it, especially if they were borderline schizophrenic.”
“Those fantasies propagated into the population,” he recalled. He suggested that something similar was happening with the widespread adoption of transgender identities, telling Rogan that a relationship exists between “creativity” and gender dysphoria.”
“They’re not stable in their identity” because “they’re creative,” Peterson insisted, adding that “creative people by definition aren’t stable in their identities, that’s what makes them creative.”
Later, Rogan sought to clarify that the motivating factor between “people who want to change their gender identity is creativity.” Peterson replied, declaring: “I don’t think so, I know so.”
Peterson’s latest appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” comes about a year after he began to speak openly about his faith journey. Peterson grew up Protestant and had spent much of his time as a public figure as a religious skeptic but appears to have embraced his faith following health problems.
Rogan, the former host of “Fear Factor,” continues to draw millions of listeners to his podcast despite receiving significant opposition for sharing what critics decry as coronavirus misinformation. When singer Neil Young threatened to remove his music from Spotify if it refused to cut ties with Rogan, the streaming platform elected to scrub Young’s songs from Spotify.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
