Jordan Peterson: “The Bible is MORE than True” (EXPLAINED)

 

I thought the message in this video was quite profound.

“What Peterson is saying is that the bible is the foundation in which most of all of the other literature in

our western civilization was built because it’s the most foundational.

Now imagine that’s the entire corpus of linguistic production all things considered now how do you understand that?

Literally how do you understand that the answer is you sample it by reading and listening to stories and listening to people talk

you sample that whole domain. You build a low resolution representation of that..

He’s saying that in order for you to see that the bible is the foundation for which our western civilization is built you can just listen to how everyone talks and the stories that they tell and if you keep those stories in mind you can hear the bible behind everything that they say.

To take it a little bit further I believe that he’s alluding to the fact that the writings of the bible have influenced our language our moral code our judicial system and really our entire modern culture in one way or another but in a larger context he’s saying that the bible has provided the structure in our culture that gives us the ability to communicate.

It isn’t [just] 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 true 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.

..the bible is more than just true.. since communication is necessary for talking about what’s true and what isn’t true then it’s not that the bible is just true but it’s actually necessary for all truths to be communicated linguistically since it’s the foundation of our shared culture which shaped our way of communicating in our western civilization.

And when it comes to the problem of perception that he mentioned he’s talking about the problem of not being able to know what’s actually true and what’s just our individual perception.

Okay, now let’s summarize his argument going all the way back to the beginning of the clip.

It seems to me that he’s saying that our culture has a fundamental set of ideas and language that we all share in order to communicate but since we’re getting more individualistic in our culture and we’re starting to be more conditioned to only seeing things from our personal individual perspectives, we’re starting to lose those shared ideas and language that allows us to be able to communicate with each other.

He’s saying that as a consequence we won’t even have a culture that communicates with each other anymore. This is why we see people just shouting at each other without any genuine effort to understand what the other side is actually saying.

He then goes on to argue that since the bible is the first book that all of our linguistic frameworks and ideas are built on top of then the bible is the foundation for our western civilization and with that he concludes that the bible is not just true but without it we wouldn’t even have the foundations to communicate what’s true and what isn’t true and because we’re moving away from that as a result our culture is losing its unified perception of reality and that’s my understanding of what he said.”