{"id":1584289,"date":"2022-08-02T09:02:38","date_gmt":"2022-08-02T13:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1584289"},"modified":"2022-08-02T09:03:40","modified_gmt":"2022-08-02T13:03:40","slug":"peterson-adam-and-eve-self-consciousness-evil-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/peterson-adam-and-eve-self-consciousness-evil-and-death\/","title":{"rendered":"PETERSON: Adam And Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, And Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fpeterson-adam-and-eve-self-consciousness-evil-and-death%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1584289&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson\u2019s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/podcasts\/biblical-series-genesis\">listen to<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/show\/biblical-series-genesis\">watch<\/a> the lecture series on DailyWire+.<\/p>\n<p>For whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories, so let\u2019s investigate a couple more of them. We\u2019ll start with the story of Adam and Eve.<\/p>\n<p>You may remember that the Bible is a series of books \u2014 Bible actually means something akin to library \u2014 and these books were written by all sorts of different people and groups of people and groups of editors who edited over and over across very, very large periods of time. So, they\u2019re authored by no one and many at the same time. There was a tradition for a long time that the earliest books were written by Moses, but that\u2019s probably not technically correct, even though it might be dramatically correct in the way that a fairytale is correct. (And I\u2019m not trying to put down fairy tales by saying that.) But there\u2019s a number of authors, and the way the authors have been identified \u2014 tentatively \u2014 is by certain stylistic commonalities across the different stories: different uses of words (like the words for God), different poetic styles, different topics, and so forth. People have been working for probably 200 years (roughly that) to try to sort out who wrote what and how that was all cobbled together. But it doesn\u2019t really matter for our purposes. What matters is that it\u2019s an aggregation of collected narrative traditions, and maybe you could say it\u2019s an aggregation of collected narrative wisdom. We don\u2019t have to go that far, but we can at least say it\u2019s aggregated narrative traditions.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There was some reason that those traditions \u2014 and not others \u2014 were kept, and there were some reasons, complex though they may have been, why they [narrative traditions] were sequenced in the order that they were sequenced. One of the things that\u2019s really remarkable about the Bible as a document is that it actually has a plot, and that\u2019s really something. It\u2019s sprawling, and it goes many places. But the fact that something\u2019s been cobbled together over several thousand years \u2014 maybe 4,000 years, maybe longer than that if you include the oral traditions that preceded it, and God only knows how old those are \u2014 that\u2019s part of the human collective imagination has cobbled together a library with a plot.<\/p>\n<p>I see the Bible as an attempt, a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. I think those problems are, primarily, the problem of self-consciousness. The fact that not only are we mortal and that we die but that we know it. That\u2019s the unique predicament of human beings, and it makes all the difference. I think that\u2019s laid out in the story of Adam and Eve. I think the reason that makes us unique is laid out in that story. Interestingly \u2014 I really realized this only after I was doing the last three lectures \u2014 the Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift into the structure of being. That\u2019s the right way to think about it, and that\u2019s really giving cosmic significance. Now, you can dispense with that and say, \u201cWell, nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance because we\u2019re these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet that\u2019s rotating out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space and nothing that happens to us matters.\u201d It\u2019s fine. You can walk down that road if you want. I wouldn\u2019t recommend it. That\u2019s part of the reason I think that, for all intents and purposes, it\u2019s untrue. It isn\u2019t a road you can walk down and live well. In fact, I think if you really walk down that road and you really take it seriously, you end up not living at all. It\u2019s certainly very reminiscent. I\u2019ve talked to lots of people who were suicidal \u2014 and seriously suicidal. The kind of conclusions that they draw about the utility of life, prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the kind of conclusions you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re interested in that you could read Tolstoy\u2019s \u201cA Confession.\u201d It\u2019s a very short book. It\u2019s a killer; it\u2019s a powerful book \u2014 very, very short. Tolstoy describes his obsession with suicide when he was at the height of his fame: most well-known author in the world, huge family, international fame, wealth beyond anyone\u2019s imagining at that time, influential, admired. He<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson\u2019s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+. For whatever reason, there is a lot packed into these stories, so let\u2019s investigate a couple more of &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1584568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1584289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1584289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1584568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}