I Stand Corrected Regarding Jordan Peterson

In this post, I directed my readers’ attention to a YouTube video by Alex O’Conner evaluating Jordon Peterson’s religiously freighted rhetoric. I said that O’Conner’s findings are devastating to anyone who listens to Peterson’s rhetoric and concludes that he is anything other than a garden variety atheist because that is what he is.

I friend whose opinion I value greatly pushed back at my characterization of Peterson as a garden variety atheist in the mode of Richard Dawkins. After all, Dawkins flatly rejects the notion that God in any form or manifestation exists, while Peterson infuses his talks with so much religion-speak, if one did not know better one would mistake him for a seeker after the consummate truth known as God.

I have given this considerable thought and I have to stay that I stand corrected. Peterson is not a garden variety atheist. He is worse. He is a false prophet of a non-god.

For all of his faults, at least Dawkins presents one with a stark binary choice: God exists/God does not exist. In a very real sense, this is a challenge to evaluate the evidence. It requires one to take a side. Does a fair evaluation of the evidence and logic truly lead to Dawkins’ conclusion? Conversely, does the evidence and logic lead to the conclusion that Dawkins is wrong because God does in fact exist. A person might get that question wrong but at least at the end of the process he has wrestled with the right question.

Peterson is worse than Dawkins because he offers a false third way. He takes the word “God” and hollows out its true content as revealed in the Bible. He then fills the hollowed-out shell with Jungian psychobabble and bids his followers to believe in his reconstituted false God. Peterson tells people they do not have to wrestle with the question of whether God really exists. They do not have to evaluate whether to believe that Christ was literally resurrected. Instead, they can comfort themselves with his false third way. And according to true Christian doctrine (as opposed to Peterson’s perversion of it), everyone who believes him and fails to put his trust in the literally resurrected Christ will die in his sins.

Yes, Peterson is brilliant. Yes, he is one of the foremost public intellectuals battling cultural Marxism on the planet today. And we should be grateful to him for that. But for all of his brilliance in the cultural and political milieu, he is affirmatively dangerous when it comes to religion. If Christian doctrine is true (and I believe it is), he is a false prophet of a non-god, and everyone who takes his preaching about his non-god seriously (and make no mistake, preaching it is) and puts it into practice, will die in his sins.