A few clips have gone viral from this video of Jordan facing off against 20 atheists. Sitting in a room with 20 smarmy atheists and being recorded on video is apparently a thing. I didn't watch any of it because it makes my skin itch just to think of what it must have been like to sit in a room with a prep school debate club hopped up on Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.
I did hear a bit of audio from one of the clips where a particularly pushy punk kid shoved the Catholic beliefs about the Virgin Mary in Jordan's face, accused Jordan of being Catholic and demanded he explain the doctrine of Mary.
Lots of people, many of them Catholics, have objected to this or that reply by Jordan during that odious session, but I won't do so without hearing them and I almost certainly wouldn't do so after hearing them, either. What in the world would motivate me to do that? The entire setup is in bad faith.
Why ask Jordan about the Virgin Mary? If you want to understand the Catholic perspective on the subject, sit down with a theologian of some repute and have a calm discussion about it. Going into a room of 20 midget feral hogs and getting attacked isn't an indication of the feral hogs' desire to learn anything, it's simply an act of interlocutory BDSM.
The bigger issue isn't with Jordan or Catholicism, it's with the thought processes of the atheists. Objecting to a theory of reality without a superior substitute isn't argument at all, it's just banging your spoon on your high chair and screaming. As far as the theology of Mary goes, I simply don't care enough to study it. Why should I? More to the point, why should anyone reply to that atheist's snarky questions?
Catholicism is a holistic hypothesis about existence. It explains cosmology, ethics, morality, purpose, meaning, science, evolution, philosophy, the origin of life and more. Scientific atheism, on its best day, is a small subset of Catholicism. That is, there is almost nothing the atheists have, such as science, that we don't have as well. There is a ton of stuff we do have that they don't.
Atheists playing gotcha games with some obscure aspect of Catholicism is like being on the losing side of a 35-3 NFL game and mocking the winning team because they only ran for 170 yards and not 175. Ha ha ha, Catholics! Take that!
My response to, "Do you know about the Catholic beliefs on the Virgin Mary?" would be a very quick, "No because I don't care."
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| Good Lord, not this foolish nitpickery again. |
"The entire setup is in bad faith."
ReplyDeleteWell, yes, of course it is. Whatever Jordan Peterson might have started as, what he is now is an attention whore. He has become addicted to being famous, but is finding that there are lots of other people who are better at attracting attention than he is. So he pulled a stunt to draw attention to himself, that he apparently designed in the hopes that it will specifically get attention from younger people. There is no intent of having any intellectual content, just controversy. He could just as easily have pulled "Jordan Peterson and twenty Christians/Muslims/Flat Earthers/Cryptozoologists/whatever". He just happened to pick "atheists" because he's noticed that the one type of celebrity Christians really love are "former atheists" who have "seen the light". And he's decided to play that role and see how far it can take him in satisfying his fame addiction.
Here is one of several posts on my blog in which I discuss/reference a quote from Carl Sagan's book, 'The Demon-Haunted World', which I think is relevant to your OP -- https://iliocentrism.blogspot.com/2024/09/zeus-and-atheist.html
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