Talking to Muslims About Christ | Mohammed Hijab & Jonathan Pageau | EP 297

Is there an ultimate purpose of life? Yeah, sure. What is it? What we're doing here, which is, what hopefully, trying to make peace. Is that enough? We'll see. Yeah, because if it's better than the alternative, what's the alternative? Hell, okay, which we're toying with. I don't mean us. Well, us too, that's for sure. But you know, things are shaky at the moment on many fronts, and we have this opportunity in front of us, all of us, to have a very abundant world, right? Where everyone has enough and maybe more than enough. And we're shaky about that. We're not sure that that's acceptable, and we're not sure everybody should have it. We're not sure everybody deserves it, and even ourselves, and we're retreating into our corners in some real sense. And we're not addressing the elephants under the carpet. And you can't do that. Like the things we're discussing contentiously now, you know, they make for rough conversations. But they make for a lot rougher streets if you don't talk them out. And you have to do that in a spirit of ignorance.

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Thank you. So, our first special guest is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. He is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998, he served as an assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He spent 15 years writing "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief." Dr. Peterson has penned the popular global bestsellers "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life" and "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos." In 2016, before the publication of "12 Rules," several of Dr. Peterson's online lectures, videos, and interviews went viral, launching him into unprecedented international prominence as a public intellectual and educator. With his colleagues, Dr. Peterson has produced two online programs to help people understand themselves better and to improve their psychological and practical functioning. He's currently working on an online university dubbed Peterson Academy. Please welcome Dr. Peterson.

We also have with us Jonathan Poju. He is an artist, and he studies Christian symbolism, and he also studies postmodernism—right, God forbid for some. Right? So we also have with us our beloved Muhammad Hijab. He is an author, comparative religionist, and philosopher of religion. He's the co-founder of the Sapience Institute and is a researcher and instructor for the organization. He has a BA in politics and a master's degree in history. He also acquired a second master's degree in Islamic Studies from the School of African Studies, and he completed a third master's degree in applied theology from the University of Oxford. Now he's studying his PhD on the philosophy of religion, specifically on the contingency argument for God's existence. In addition, Hijab has undergone formal training in Islamic Studies, with a focus on the Quran, prophetic traditions, and legal reasoning. Hijab has completed Islamic seminary courses and has been given formal permission to relay Islamic knowledge on selected Islamic fields. Muhammad is one of the very few Muslim public figures who deal comparatively with political, philosophical, and theological issues such as—and has amassed a following with many subscribers on YouTube, in English and Arabic. So please welcome Muhammad Hijab and, of course, Jonathan.

Foreign. So, because I'm 100% disagreeable and not polite at all, I want to just—I want to get the elephant out of the room. I do like to do that, and there's been a recent video that you put up—a message to the Muslims. And before I say this, I do want to speak about the important topics, the theological topics, and all these kinds of postmodernism, like that, that will come. But I just wanted to mention this first because for me, it's just get the elephant out of the room so that we can move on. Sometimes it's just replaced by a slightly smaller elephant.

Well, a smaller elephant is better than nothing. Yeah. I was going to say is that you know it didn't land well with a lot of the Muslim community, yeah, and I think the reason why is that it was seen as condescending. It was seen as kind of patronizing. What was your intention of this video?

Exactly to start a dialogue, stupidly and badly.

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Because that's how you have to start. You know, we talked already about the idea of tolerance, and I'm actually not here to be tolerant, you know, because tolerance sort of presumes that I know what I'm doing and you guys don't, but I'll put up with you anyways. And I don't actually think I know what I'm doing exactly, and so I think while you might have something to teach me. And so it's not so much tolerance as I would say hopefully something approximating an expression of reasonable humility. Which is, well, first of all, we occupy the same space, and as far as I'm concerned, it'd be better if we got along. And we've all had our own revelations, you know, personally and socially, and we don't know how to integrate those revelations, and that's rough. That's hard.

And so I'm here to listen, and the message was preposterous in some sense, although not much more so than the message I made to Christians, which I wouldn't say was exactly flattering. And, you know, I thought it would probably ruffle some feathers, but I thought it might also initiate a dialogue—or at least further it. And that has happened. You know, I mean certainly there were many people who were irritated at me and thought that I was being condescending, and I wasn't trying to be. Because I do have a lot of people who are paying attention to my lectures, of course, around the world, on the Islamic side, which is quite surprising to me, especially with regard to the attention that's been given to the biblical lectures, and I don't take any of that for granted. And I wasn't trying to either capitalize on it or interfere with it. I was trying to do the next stupid thing that might move things forward a bit, and that's actually—it's actually worked, I would say.

Well, first of all, I am here, and I know that's not a direct consequence of that message, but at least it didn't break it. And there have been many other Muslim groups who've reached out to me in a serious way, at least in part because of that. And so I think we have to understand that we're going to stumble into each other a fair bit if we actually try to talk because of all the elephants and the snakes that are lurking under the carpet. And I think it's a very good thing to get the mountain open.

Yeah, I'm a very agreeable person as it turns out. Yes, I know it's to my detriment. But I also know I wouldn't have guessed, to be honest, that you're very agreeable.

Yes. It's one of my major character flaws, but I don't like conflict at all. And but the reason I would say I'm prone to engage in it is because sometimes what's under the carpet needs to be revealed. Because it's going to cause a lot of trouble if it just sits there and brews or broods and multiplies. And so here's one of the advantages of disagreeable people: having them around because they will haul things up for inspection that everyone else might be loath to confront. You know, the downside is, well, you might do that too often.

You know, and that's a hard thing to get right. So I'm not here in a spirit of tolerance. I'm here in the spirit of ignorance. And I'm hoping—see, the other thing I've been thinking through—and yeah, guys can tell me what you think about this—is it seems that in the situation we're in now, sort of globally speaking, that it would be useful for people of religious faith to note that there are other people of religious faith with whom they have much in common. One of them being religious faith.

And that they are also confronting, as people of religious faith, a world that is attempting to, let's say, shake itself free of that. And so it isn't exactly obvious to me that it's a great time for people of religious faith to concentrate on their differences, given that there are perhaps more important elephants to address, let's say, or fish to fry. And so I've been trying to—I'm very ignorant about the Islamic tradition, and I'm trying to rectify that. It's very difficult to step outside your own culture and to really understand someone else's, and so—and I'm under no illusions, I hope, about the degree of understanding that I've managed. But I have tried to understand what we might share in common, and that's crucial.

And so certainly, one of the ideas that we all share in common on the religious front, let's say, is that there is an ultimate unity that should be placed above all else. And so that's part of the great monotheistic tradition, and I'm going to speak mostly as a psychologist rather than as, say, an advocate of the Christian tradition because it isn't obvious to me that—let me kind of push back a little bit at that point because you're an individual.

Like, obviously, in your newest book, you're talking about categories, about precision. And I would say you're an individual that is very precise. You're categorized—if I was to say anything, I would say that you—individuals are scrupulously meticulous and exactitude, and I don't know meticulousness or whatever.

Yeah, so you speak, and you think about what you're going to say before you say it. That's what you're known for. In fact, if someone says something which is kind of off the mark, ill, but you pull them up for it, right? And you know, usually because I don't understand it. Then, you know, for example, like the Cathy Newman interview, like the assumptions and the questioning that she had when she was questioning yourself, you pulled her up on it. And that's why the discussion was so popular.

And just a clinical psychologist, so what I was going to say is this: For example, if I were to make a video, right? I say this message to the, you know, to white Canadians or something—yeah, yeah—and I said, "You know, it's hard to talk to them," and I say, "Look, you know, sensitively when I reach out to some Russians." You know, oh, you know, heaven forbid. You know, reach out to black Africans or First Nation people, you know, whatever it may be. How do you think the community of white Canadians, let's say for sake of argument, will react to that kind of message?

Well, if it was you—yeah, well, you're pretty disagreeable, so you'd probably get bit back a lot.

Yeah, but I don't—I don't—it’s hard to say until you do it, you know? Yeah, I mean, I have reached out to other communities. Let's say I did an interview with a friend of mine who's a Native American carver who lives on the west coast, and you know, I'm not very happy with the narrative that's being promoted in Canada, which is that the European settlement of Canada is best viewed as genocidally colonial.

And having said that, my friend, this carver, was in a residential school in Canada, and the residential schools were put forward by the government and other institutions in an attempt to separate the indigenous children from their families and then socialize them rapidly according to European norms. And there was some positive motivation for that, and sometimes that helped and worked, but it wasn't—the things that did happen was that some schools were, let's say, invaded by people of a pronounced pedophilic and sadistic bent, and my friend ended up in one of those schools, and his life was so dreadful that you can't even hear about it without serious emotional damage.

And so, you know, I went forward without discussion, and it was very contentious, but it went very well, and it told a story that was true and needed to be told. Yeah. And so, you know, you step into foreign territory at your peril, that's for sure. But, you know, and it was relatively difficult for me to arrange for this to be a possibility, of course.

And my thought, again, because I'm trying to look for what we have to offer each other rather than what divides us, I thought it was worthwhile in an economy as volatile as this one.

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Push back again, once again, once again on this point. So, for example, it's not always what you say; sometimes it can be what you don't say. So for instance, I think you've become somewhat of an emblem of Western civilization, right, in terms of your intention to help us.

No, you have, and I’ll also push back on a point that this is a foreign culture because I think that it’s, like, you mentioned this in lectures as well—that Islam has now become part of, like, you know, Western culture.

Yeah, well, that's the open question, as we noted in the introductory marks. It's like, well, is Islam part of the West? We're kind of having the same discussion about Russia in some real sense. And yeah, that's really going well at the moment.

Yeah, so there's that part. But what I would say is that, you know, if there is a bloody history of Western colonialism, and that's almost undeniable, like for example, look at Algeria, for instance. Algeria, when it was annexed by France. And there's no dispute, there's no dispute in what happened there.

So the issue, I'll give you one example of many. This Spanish colonialism of Latin America, for example, there are things that happened, and it's people saying that things that happened on only just on the Western front. Yeah, those things that happened on the Muslim front as well, of course, that's true.

Yeah, no doubt about it, right? No, I'm not going to stand here and, you know, defend them, who came, and we're very intolerant to producing Christians and kicked them out of their homes and stuff like that, who existed in Spain as well, in fact.

So the point is, I feel like—I don't know, as a psychologist, I think my question would be to you that don't you think is it of any benefit to be concessionary in this regard? Like to start off a discussion by saying, "We know that these are things that could cause resentment."

Yes, because, like, for example, I know a lot of Algerian people, and this is very clear in their historical memory. Yes, and the accusation will be that the West has colonial amnesia. They don’t—they are not taking into account what they've done.

I'll be honest with you, they don't even know how. Well, okay, yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, look, here’s how I would address that psychologically. In many of the mythological stories that I've read, there is the motif of the evil uncle. And so, for example, in the ancient Egyptian cosmology, there were two—there were four deities, four central deities, although a host of associated deities. And one of them was Osiris, who was the deity of the state.

That might be a good way of thinking about it. And he had an evil brother, Seth, who was always conspiring in the background to overthrow the state and to establish his own rules based on power. And the Egyptians, thousands of years ago, had figured out by that point, because their society was quite large, that there is something in the social structure itself that posed a threat to the structure.

And that was the tendency for the structure and its leaders to become willfully blind, and for conspiratorial powers or patterns that would use resentment and the desire for power to overthrow. That they thought of Osiris as willfully blind and Seth as an eternal danger, and that's true.

But there's another element to the evil uncle too, which is that in some real sense—and it's a very difficult thing to sort through morally—all of us walk on blood-soaked ground because human history is, in some regards, a nightmarish catastrophe.

And some of that's just because life was so difficult, but it's also because people committed unbelievably cruel, atrocious, and deceptive acts. And so we're all stuck with this problem that here we are, in relative peace and harmony so far, although we seem to be doing everything we can to try to disrupt that at the moment.

And part of the price that's being paid for that is an endless litany of historical catastrophe, and then we all have to face up to what does that mean for us in terms of our individual responsibility and how do we construe ourselves and our society in light of that fact? And we could go back and forth continually about whose historical atrocities were worse, and that's a rough contest because, you know, the devil is definitely in the details there.

And then it also brings up the other problem, which is, well, when the Spaniards went to Central America, a lot of the bloodshed they produced or the death they produced was actually a consequence of the introduction of disease because that took out about 95% of the native population in the Western Hemisphere.

And then the conquistadors were—well, maybe they weren't the finest representatives of the highest flowering of Western civilization. We don't know what to what degree they were the sort of thugs that couldn't get along at home and went out adventuring. And even if I say attempted to take full responsibility for that, I'm not sure what it would mean because I suspect I have a lot more in common with you people in the modern world than I do with Spanish conquistadors from 300 years ago.

Now, I'm not saying I bear no responsibility for the bloodshed of the past, but I would say we all bear that responsibility. That's something I would say that something like the conception of original sin...

Yeah, that's the point of difference. To be honest, I would disagree to that point. Like as a Muslim, there is a verse in the Quran that says that one soul should not bear the responsibility of someone else's actions.

Yeah, well, that's the other ethical complications, so can you call me out in relationships? But it's complicated, right? Because at the same time, you do say—and I don't mean you personally—but you know, we can say things like, “Well, the West is not bearing sufficient responsibility for its colonial past.”

And so at some level, that kind of devolves down to the individual. So let me kind of rephrase it then. I think, you know, I think that's more of a left-on criticism. That's like, you know, there's reparations and affirmative action programs.

Yeah, I'm not advocating any of that. I don't even believe in any of that, to be honest with you.

Nor me. Yeah, so what I was putting as an alternative to that is this: there is this kind of—I would call this maybe an oriental—it’s a new orientalist narrative, which states that Islam is incapable of XYZ, call it tolerance, call it whatever it is. And look at what's happened in Islamic history. You’ve got all of these deaths and you've got all of these kinds of things happening compared to what we have in the West.

And what we're saying is that let's look at what you have in the West because liberalism was an ideology that was cited in the 17th century, like I mean really it was crystallized, you know, with John Locke and all those kinds of things then. And after liberalism was established, in fact, the constitution and the documents for the founding fathers and stuff like that were based on the liberal secular principles.

Even after that, you had Napoleonic Wars; even after that, you had colonialism continue. You had slavery continue until 1867, whatever was, you know, the American Civil War ended. So what we're saying is that this picture of history—that you know the West is best, basically, this idea because our ideology can fix all problems—is not reasonable when you look at the historical records.

I mean, one of um one scholar called Navid Sheikh actually done a piece, it's called “Body Count,” and he was counting the amount of people that died in each civilization. And he put Western civilization as the highest because you have things like World War I and World War II, and these things were—not religiously inspired—when you cannot—you can argue to what extent World War I was religiously inspired. But certainly, Islam didn't was not a main feature of the 30 million people that died in World War I or however many million people died in order to.

So the point is that we're saying is that, and obviously you've got concepts in the West like manifest destiny, and which I think every single president of the United States of America believed in Westwood expansion, these kinds of things. The point is, is that it's a proposition that the ideology of the West can fix our problems. This is what we have an issue with because what we're saying is that if we look at the historical record, there is no evidence of that. In fact, what has shown us is that there's more bloodshed.

Individualism has caused more death. Like with all due respect, I know that you cherish individuals. I'm not saying everything is bad about it, but when you have a society deplete of a communitarian ethic, it's bereft of a communitarian ethic, then you can have these issues.

And so, these are conversations. And I think you are moving towards the communitarianism your newest book, you're talking about institutions and these kinds of things and the respectful tradition and these kinds of things. I'm not sure if I'm reading you correctly, but these are the kinds of conversations I think we need to have.

But on that point, I think—I don't want this to be interrogative and I just want to introduce one thing because I think it's important.

I think Jordan, you're very kind, and I understand, I also watched the message to Muslims, and I thought there were some problems with it, definitely. Okay. But when you said there's an elephant in the room that I want to address, my mind immediately went to videos I've seen of you, okay, with some of your friends in the street and suggesting violence and suggesting aggressive actions against other communities, which in the West is something that, let's say in Canada, people don't do that.

And that even though there might be civil conflicts, we have a state, we have police, we have an apparatus—yeah, which is not completely perfect—which functions to instill the rules. So when I see someone in the street surrounded by men wearing masks, yes, who are talking about, "If these other groups come out, you know, they're going to see us, and we're going to be there, and I'm looking for Jews," and talking about blood, and there's these very strange behaviors—

Yeah, we're looking for Jews. You remember that when I said that exact same one? I just remember you talking to police about Jewish people.

Yeah, I would like to get an exact quote.

Okay, so I don’t remember—we’re cool. So the other one, the one that I definitely saw that you spoke for quite a while was relating to some issues with Hindu.

So what happened recently? I don't want to know.

The reason why it's important is that I have met—I'm a Christian, very much a Christian. I have many problems with modern Western culture, right?

And, but we are in the West, okay, right? And you are in the West. Yeah, and I am a Westerner, right? You live in the West, and so—and I'm British, yes, just like you're a Canadian.

Exactly, yes. And so that to me, the elephant in the room is part of—that's part of the elephant in the room. There are many people who do not want to come here because of those videos.

Okay, well, there's a lot of people that told me not to have this conversation with Jordan. Yeah.

And that's why me and George people don't want to have difficult conversations. But what I'm saying with Jordan is that what makes him gallant and brave is that despite those voices that are the voices of disunity because he's been canceled more times than I have.

Yeah, but despite the fact that he's been canceled in Cambridge University, whatever. I don't care about all these institutions, with all due respect. I know this man as a person of influence, and in my estimation, I see him as one of the most, if not the most influential, Western public voice, right? So for that reason, I speak to him. And for that reason, I don't apologize to anyone for doing so.

And I think in a way, he sees the same thing in me. Maybe not to the same level, but the fact that I'm half his age, he knows what's going to come in 30 years time. So he's playing the cards right.

And I think at the end of the day, my voice, my emotions, what I'm saying in the streets of London or Leicester or whatever else is how a lot of Muslim people feel. But don't forget, yes, I'm disagreeable, and I'm not—that's my temperament. It's not the temperament of the average Muslim, so you've got to differentiate between me as an individual, me, Muhammad Hijab, as an individual, and Islam.

Do you see? If you say, "Muhammad, you are a hypocrite. You are a bad guy. You are violent." So you know what? That's something I have to look into. You know what I mean? If that's your advice to me or something, I would also say that there's no moral advantage in being a pushover either.

Yes. And so these things are very hard to calibrate correctly. And so, well, and if we come at this in a spirit of mutual ignorance and with some degree of—maybe this is where tolerance is more of an issue—is, you know, we're going to have to tolerate each other's rough edges and imperfections in order to talk.

Even if we think that there's something useful to be gleaned. And you know, my sense is that, well, we're called upon to separate the wheat from the chaff. And that's not so much to damn the chaff as it is to gather the wheat.

And it seems to me in the biblical stories, in the Old Testament, there's an immense emphasis, a strange emphasis in some real sense. It's one of the things that makes the text so remarkable on the moral stranger and foreigner.

And so when the society is unstable and shaking in a variety of ways, it's often the moral foreigner who comes in with something wise to say. And I think that's definitely true of those biblical narratives, and it's very interesting that they point them out.

But I think it's also true practically, it's like it's not as if any of us like—we want to have faith in our faith, and we need that because it keeps us together individually and it unites us socially. But then, if we insist that my—as if I insist that my faith, which is more like my pride in my own belief, is 100% correct, then I've confused myself with my faith. I've confused myself with Christianity or perhaps you've confused yourself with Islam, and that's a big mistake.

Because—so let me ask you both a question then since we can talk. By the way, one clarification with the question. I've never asked for violence, and that's an accusation I think that needs to be—you need to look back at because I've never said, "Let's go and do violence."

I said that if such and such group come out again, which were a group of armed people, then we'll be there to defend the community. I don't—I’ve never said in my whole life, and I’ll challenge anybody to find anything that’s opposite from what I've just said now. That’s one thing.

Second thing I'll say is this: is that—and if it was a violence issue, if I did say that, what's happening with the Metropolitan Police? Why am I not behind bars? Why have there not been a single investigation? It's 210,000 people that have watched the video, unless the police have put their, you know, fingers in their ears or that they are—if you want to accuse the police of, you know, negligence or incompetence, that's a different story.

Let's go to the second point because you were saying now about this basically dogmatism, let's just call it for what it is. Like, you know, pride and organism, right, and that's something we all have to watch because it’s a hard line to walk because you want to be an advocate for your faith.

But what world do you know, right? You're ignorant beyond comprehension on both of you. This is a question to both of you. Is there an ultimate purpose of life?

Yeah, sure. What is it? What we’re doing here, which is, what hopefully, trying to make peace. Is that enough?

We'll see, yeah, because if it's better than the alternative, what's the alternative? Hell, okay, which we're toying with. I don't mean us. Well, us too, that's for sure. But you know, things are shaky at the moment on many fronts, and we have this opportunity in front of us, all of us, to have a very abundant world, right, where everyone has enough and maybe more than enough.

And we're shaky about that. We're not sure that that's acceptable, and we're not sure everybody should have it. We're not sure everybody deserves it, and even ourselves, and we're retreating into our corners in some real sense. And we're not addressing the elephants under the carpet. And you can't do that.

Like the things we're discussing contentiously now, you know, they make for rough conversations but they make for a lot rougher streets if you don't talk them out, and you have to do that in a spirit of ignorance. You know, like I was hoping to come here today and, well, unless—I talk a lot, there’s my flaw, you know, but I don’t know how to feel the right way forward. I think part of it is, well, first of all, to find commonalities. We believe in the fundamental necessity of a uniting book across the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths.

That's not nothing. Like that’s a strange thing to insist upon, and yet we all seem to agree we believe in a higher and purposeful unity, the necessity of that. And then also in the necessity of putting that above all else. And we also agree that we’re not very good at that. But that's the hardest one to get—that even if you do claim in some sense to worship the highest in this monotheistic sense, that doesn't mean you're very good at it, and that's a hard pill to swallow.

Especially when you're trying to also be a courageous knight of your faith, let's say. It's hard to be properly humble in the face of the Divine, but that might be in some sense the proper command. I mean the fact that Islam means submission is a reflection of that in some sense, right? Just remember who's God here and who isn't, and so—and that's a very hard thing to keep in mind.

So when I listen to you, you disagreeable character, I’m trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff, you know? Because there's no doubt I have many things to learn. As I learn to, to some degree, I appreciate this part of like, you know, I learn from your humility, honestly, the way you come across.

And once again, I do appreciate both of you coming here, you know, and I appreciate this agreeability as well, like what you've said. That’s good. I deserve accountability just like he does. I don't want to be a person who, you know, who doesn’t count this [__] out who dishes out well and can’t get it himself.

I deserve it. What I wanted to say is this to both of you: I want to do a thought experiment, yeah? And so, imagine you're going to sleep. I don't know what you guys are saying now. What I'll tell you about staying—you’re watching my videos, you know, with me, with the masks and stuff like that—before you go to sleep, subscribe on the channel, whatever you do, yeah?

And now you're—after you've, you know, put the dislike and done your negative comments, which I deleted already and put it in the trash, which is what you do is all the tweets, and we can talk about that later— but after that's all happened and you've gone to sleep, you both go to sleep now, right? You wake up and you find yourselves on a ship—on a ship, yeah?

And people are eating food, people are drinking, people are this and that. So this is happening now. What would be the first questions that you would ask to people around you? Would you ask things like, "How did I get here? Where are we going?" Does that seem like the first?

Yeah, those are good questions to ask in general. Where are they? How did we get here? And this is, where are we going? Beautiful.

Yeah, beautiful. Okay, so from the Islamic perspective, it’s this, right? First of all, ask these three questions: where do I come from? Where am I going? What am I doing here? What is the purpose of life? What is it?

And the answer is we came from a creator, okay? So we can approach this in whatever argument you like. I'm doing a PhD in contingency argument. You can do anything you want. You can do, for example, through the fact that the universe is regular and stable and uniform and possesses life. What's the best explanation for that? Is it knowledge or not knowledge?

So you say it’s knowledge, right? Or if you say it's a creative capacity of some sort. We came from this creative capacity. We came from this knowledge force, right? So that's the first thing.

We'll say we came from this force, this higher power, right? So that's the first thing we'll say. We came from this force, this higher power. Where are we going? We're going back to the higher power, right? And we're going back to the higher power with our deeds, which we have to be responsible for, which is exactly the hallmark of what you stand for.

And that's, I believe genuinely, that's why you're asking. Why are so many people listening to you? Because we reject original sin. Would you respect original sin? It says that one man gave us a sin; the other man took it away. Basically, I mean, we're falling creatures and then Jesus—you've got to believe in the solo feeder, you believe in whatever comes.

So I don't believe that.

Oh, fair enough, okay. I don't believe in original sin the way you described it.

Fine, no, not original sin. It's an orthodox view, yeah, okay, fine. But the issue is this: I didn't say I believed in it either. I just said that the concept of original sin is an expression of this problem that we're describing, which is that we're all burdened with something approximating the thrownness and this ambivalent relationship we have with the atrocity of history.

And but—and that's worse because if you study the atrocity of history with any degree of seriousness, you have to take account of the fact that people like you did it. And you might think, "Well, I wouldn't do it." It's like, yeah, I get you—I wouldn't be so sure about that for sure.

I mean, you know, you were talking about the kind of—you were talking about the suffering. And we're obviously—one of the major sufferings is the Holocaust. I was reading the book "The Meaning for Life" by Victor Frankl. I'm sure you're aware of it where he then produced logotherapy and all these kinds of things.

And it goes back to what Nietzsche said, you know, if you have a why, almost any how is possible—you know, bearable, yeah. If you have a why, almost any how is possible. So it goes back to—everything goes back to purpose.

Logotherapy, yeah, just if you have a purpose, then everything is possible. That's why I think that you can do the best as a human species in the human condition if your purpose is transcendental, it's higher than the physical, the material.

And for us, the purpose is mentioned in chapter 51, verse 56 of the Quran, which is, "We have not created human beings and jinn except for that they may worship me." What is worship? It's the epitome—the higher point of submission is the epitome of love as well.

Jonathan has an interesting take on that too that has to do with celebration, which I think is psychologically appropriate. Do you want to—I don't want to put you on the spot, but it's something I've been struggling to understand more. I attended some Orthodox ceremonies with Jonathan and also on my own, and he's very perspicacious when it comes to describing the role of both worship and ritual.

And so there's an element. Anyways, I’ll let you continue with that.

No, I agree. I agree that worship is also the manner in which we bind together, right? And so without something we celebrate together, then we don't—and so we have different levels of what we celebrate.

You know, we can celebrate in our families and the things that bind us, but ultimately that has to reach all the way up into something which is beyond. I think that's actually very powerful, you know? And in fact, the very first lines of the Quran are "Alhamdulillah," which is, "All praise and thanks belong to God, Lord of the worlds."

All praise and all thanks. And this is a kind of celebration. This is a kind of praise. You know, we agree that praising God at the highest level—celebrating God. I mean, the word "Hallelujah"—well, I would say in some sense if we're doing that well, there were some comments at the beginning about the importance of music, and you opened this event with music.

And I've been beginning to open my events with music. And part of the reason that that's very much worthwhile and has to do with this drumbeat that underlies everything is that music is a manifestation of something like the joyful spirit of harmonious play.

And it's not semantic, right? It grips you, and it says— I heard you say something before about this. You said that music was impervious to representation. It's impervious to representation, the meaning of music is impervious to representation.

Yeah, I’d say that was a very powerful way to know you know, and so with a musical manner in which the Quran is presented, a major part of that, yes, is the music.

And the music speaks—we know the music speaks of layers of patterned harmony. And you talked about the individualism of the West. And I think that there's a flaw in that particularized conception that needs to be addressed by something that's more approximating a communitarian ethos.

And I think you can understand that relationship to music because, look, to some degree the three of us can sit on stage, and everyone in the audience, we can be comfortable at the moment psychologically, so we're not too anxious and we're kind of engaged because there's a certain degree of playful harmony that we've established—especially with him.

Yeah, so this is right, but we're able to integrate that. And so that means we can remain calm. And so one of the things that indicates is that part of our ability to remain calm and focused is dependent on social integration.

So you have to ask yourself, well, could you be saying if your marriage was insane, could you be saying if your children—if your relationship with your children was too fractious, could you be saying if you had no friends? If you didn't integrate yourself into the community and maybe the state and then maybe a higher vision?

And as far as I can tell, the answer to that is no, you can't be saying by yourself. It's not merely a matter of psychological integration. It's not merely a matter of the isolated individual.

And of course we understand that in the West, although perhaps not as well as we should formally because we'll punish criminals for example by putting them in solitary confinement, and that's another indication of the impossibility of—maybe if you're an expert meditator and a religious man, you could tolerate the solitude, but you probably wouldn't be a criminal then.

So my point is, is that I view this process of integration as a multi-layered process that involves the integration of the community all the way up to the highest place. And yes, and about how this place has to be a unity, as Jonathan pointed out, or we’re divided.

And so we might want to seek amongst us as much as we can for a common unity, at least start with that. And so, and that's what we're trying to do in this conversation, yes.

But unity is different than uniformity. So yes, I see the difference being is that, you know, in the Islamic discussion or discourse, it's like there’s this—there's a verse in the Quran, in fact, this is—you have your religion, we have ours.

We can demarcate and still tolerate. That's the point. And I say appreciate, even. Yeah, even appreciate that would be good people love each other. I mean, that's the thing.

Going back to the message of Muslims, I think this is where classical question—have you ever been to a Muslim country?

Yes.

Which ones have you been to?

I've been to Morocco, and I've been to Turkey. And have I been to any other Muslim countries? Not yet.

Okay. There's many on the itinerary.

Go to a Muslim country with a Christian population. I'm from—I'm originally from Egypt. Yeah. We've had Coptic Christians there for years.

Yeah. We've had them 400 years. I mean, they were there before the Muslims came. Right? And the point is that if you go to Ghana, go to Nigeria, this bleak image of Muslims and Christians kind of fighting each other, I don't think that's what's really going on. I'm not saying that there’s no grievance there when the Christian community is in Muslim-majority lands.

Yeah. Be a lie, and that would be false. And that can easily be just refuted. Why I'm saying is that it's not as bad as you think. If you go to these countries, you will not find—I do not think you will find what's going on, for example, you're talking about Hindus in India with the Muslim minorities in a supposedly, you know, majority which is a peaceful religion.

What's going on there? What's going on in China with the Muslim minority there? Or, for example, may I add, like, so say what's happening in Palestine as well?

So, yeah, I don't want to paint any large-scale endeavor with the brush that's, let's say, dipped in the blood of its worst excesses. I don't think that's helpful because then we're all irredeemable in some real sense.

I think it's much wiser for us to see what we do see, what we can jointly celebrate, and see if we can manage that in something like a spirit of ignorance and hope. You know, because one of the things I learned a long time ago, it was very helpful for me as a clinician, was that if everything wasn't perfect around me all the time, it was probably at least in part because I was much less than I could conceivably be.

And one of the things I learned from Carl Jung, who's a great thinker, was that what you need most will be found where you least want to look. And yes, well, it’s almost by definition, right? Because you can imagine that you're most likely to be most ignorant about what you're most afraid of and most contemptuous of.

And so by definition, that's the last place you want to look. And if you're an advocate of a given religious faith, one of the last places you might want to look is in the wisdom of an alternative faith. I agree.

But, you know, that's—well, who are you to be such a committed advocate of a faith that's so complex that there's no way that someone like you can understand it? And I mean that of your own faith.

And so it's not so obvious that the stranger you think is the devil doesn't have something to say. I get you. But, yeah, I once heard you quote Carl Jung because obviously you mentioned him a lot in your books, and I learned a lot from you about Carl Jung.

Yeah, he stated that, you know, the West are technological giants but moral dwarfs in comparison.

Yeah, so and that's the problem all over the world increasingly, right? We're technological giants to some extent. But what I was going to say here is that, going back to Carl Jung here—because for example, and going back to the issue of purpose, yeah?

I watched your discussion with Sam Harris, and you were speaking about yourself—the last one—no, there was one that you’ve done. I don't know what it was, it wasn’t that famous. You weren’t speaking to him like this, but there was one point of it which really was, like, it gave me an insight into your—I don’t want to be a psychologist here, right?

But again, maybe I dare say it gave me an insight into your psychological state because Sam Harris said to you—that he said, “Your conception of pragmatism that truth is malleable or whatever?”

So it’s not one capital T truth.

Well, there's no—I said more that I don’t believe that the most fundamental truth is objective, yeah, and I don't think it can be.

Yeah, so in that sense, your perspective and you know this as well, is more epistemologically pragmatist rather than correspondence theory, right?

So correspondence theory says that there’s one truth out there.

I think correspondence theories have to be nested under pragmatic theories in some real sense.

Okay, I see your perspective.

What I was going to say was this: he said if you believe in this, yeah, it will be at your peril.

And you know what you said? You responded, you retorted, you said, “It has been at my peril.” You said it has not—

Let me—let's focus on this because this is actually deep—you said it has been at my peril.

Now let me submit something to you today. Could it be that it's like your peril because if you don't believe in Truth, with a capital T, in the correspondence theory sense—that there is a God and that's a true statement, just like two plus two equals four is a true statement.

Just like, just like the geocentric, the heliocentric model is a true statement in that sense, there is a God out there, and he created the world, he created you—he's sustaining the universe. He is maintaining the universe. There is a true statement, and that is in a correspondent sense.

If you don't have that level of certainty, then you'll end up being an existential angst, and you will end up being depressed because that’s what the Quran says.

The Quran says whoever swerves away from my remembrance will have a depressed life.

So I think that—well, I think almost by definition when you veer from a path oriented toward the highest unity, that you fall apart.

It's by definition, you know? I don't know what that means specifically with regards to a correspondence theory because the correspondence theorists tend to be more oriented towards a materialist viewpoint, and that doesn't seem to me to work out very well when discussing something like God.

Do I think that we strive towards a higher Unity—that that unity is real and that it's necessary? There's no contradiction in having correspondence theory in dualism or idealism.

It doesn't have to be materialism because that would indicate the truth of preempiricism.

Well, I would say then my answer to that is that I try to act as if that's true, and I think—I say I act as if it’s true because I'm not in a position to make any final judgments, in some real sense.

But I am in a position to stake my life on certain faith-based propositions. That’s what you can do. That doesn't mean you're right, but that’s what you have at your disposal.

And so I am trying to do that to feel the proper way forward in this spirit of, let’s say, playful unity, yes? And to put that above all else, which is partly why I also said that I did—that's my peril.

The thing is, what I would say is that if you take the proposition that truth is utility, yeah? And what is useful is that which is true—that's basically the American pragmatist stance.

If you take that—if—well, it’s not exactly, not exactly.

Well, see, I think that’s what Charles Peirce said almost by word. I know, I know, yeah. The pragmatists are more like engineers, which is, well, you can't build a perfect bridge because, what do you know?

You can't build anything perfect, but you can build a bridge that's a bridge insofar as it will stand up and allow you to walk across it for 400 years. And so, and then the notion there is, well, it’s not perfect, it doesn’t correspond precisely to the ultimate nature of reality, let's say.

But it’s good enough to move you from point A to point B, and so, yes. But the—going back to Victor Frankl and the idea of meaning, yeah?

What I'm saying is, I know you're a psychoanalysis analyst. This from the Quranic paradigm—this will not be enough meaning based on your current paradigm.

According to the Islamic diagnosis, you will be depressed. Why? Because your purpose is not strong enough.

Do you see the point?

Yes, well, that's probably true. I know that sounds a bit intrusive, so I do apologize for that.

But I don't think it is intrusive from that— from that orientation towards unity, then yes. I know this from a psychological perspective.

If you deviate from orientation toward the highest unity, which you might think about as the highest goal, yes—two things happen.

One is you experience less positive emotion, so joy and enthusiasm and engagement, because positive emotion is experienced in relation to a goal, not as a consequence of achieving it.

So if you're pursuing the highest goal, then you're celebrating most intently. And then if the goal you're pursuing isn't unified, then it's multiplicitous and then you're confused and anxious and unstable and depressed. Exactly.

I would say that's by definition. Well, I was reading—recently, I've read all your books, and I've even read some of your peer-reviewed work because when I was going to speak to you, then I said, “You know, I’m going to do my homework.”

So I read everything. One of the things that you said one time in "Maps of Meaning," you started off the book by saying when you were a young lad—I don't know how young you were—you said that you found the doctrines of Christianity incomprehensible and absurd.

Yeah. And you also said that you found you had some kind of issue with Christianity because of the Genesis narrative and how in incongruent it was with scientific narratives.

You went to a pastor, you said, or a church clerical sign, and then you left the church.

Now, I've got a question. Do you still have the same position, or have you changed your position?

Well, I've changed my position a lot. I was only 13 then. You know, I was caught up in the battle, you know, in so far as it was manifested in me.

When I was 13, I was caught in the battle between enlightenment rationality and traditional narrative belief. I had no idea how to reconcile those two things.

Do you feel like you can do that?

No, I'm doing my best to reconcile, yes.

And I think, well, I certainly can do it a lot more than I did when I was 13. Let me give you an example, right? This point, when you were 13, I think you were thinking straight.

I'll be sorry to be very straight, man. It’s hard to believe that someone is disagreeable with you as you imagine because someone with an IQ of 180, whatever you have, yeah?

Someone of your intelligence, when you were 13, you probably had an IQ of I don’t know, 120 or something.

Yeah. So he was—you were operating like my friend over here. I said it’s on his level. We’re at the age of 13.

But what I was going to say was that, you know, the reason why I think he was because—look at the Trinity, for example. Look at the schisms. Now, this goes to your specialism that the idea of three all-powerful entities—that Jesus is all-powerful; that the Father is all-powerful; the Son is all-powerful; the Holy Spirit is all-powerful.

But there's not three all-powerfuls; there's one all-powerful.

You have one ultimately willing being with your person, which is Jesus. Another person, which is ultimately willing, which is the Son. The Quran states about this in chapter 23, verse 1, 91.

It says that Allah has not taken any son, and he did not have any creator with him. Had that been the case, they would have stripped one another for what? They would have competed and tried to outstrip one another for power, meaning this idea of three all-powerful persons is unintelligible, to say the least.

The idea that Jesus Christ exhibits two natures—I know that there are schisms, and there's difference of opinion among Christians, but the fact that you have this human nature where Jesus is walking and he sees the tree, and he can't eat from the tree, he doesn’t know that the tree is in season or not, although he doesn’t know when the hour is, or whatever it may be.

The Quran says it very clearly—time, him and his mom used to eat food. This proposition that they are limited and unlimited at the same time is a contradiction.

It's an affront to logic. That's it. This will cause you cognitive dissonance because if you want to be a rational actor and you want to be—that's the thing.

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to be a rational actor. But you do when you do your scientific experiments. That's true.

So why’d you—I mean, why’d you separate the two things? Because rationality shouldn't be subordinated to something above it, and I'm trying to subordinate myself to that.

And so my reaction to what you're saying is that—this isn't an insult, yeah, I’m telling you what my reaction is. Please—it’s not even a criticism.

Of course, I find the discussion that discussion—as soon as it started, I found that less interesting than what we were doing before. It was harder for me to focus on, and I think the reason for that is that it transforms to some—and I'm not saying this isn't necessary sometimes, but it transforms the transcendent into something like an intellectual and propositional discussion.

And so in some sense, we're debating perhaps not the fine points of theology because they're more like the blunt points of theology. But there's something about that that isn't what I want to do with you, yes?

You know, and it isn't that it's not necessary. So let me flip it around, right? So I agree. So one of the things I'm very curious about is obviously the figure of Christ is contentious, yes?

And so the Jews don't know what to make of Christ in some fundamental sense because he seems like a continuation of the prophetic tradition in some real sense. Plus, he was Jewish, so that makes things complicated.

And then, of course, the Christians put the figure of Christ as central in some real sense.

But that begs the question of the relationship between Christ and God. And then in the Muslim community, Christ is also a central figure.

And so I'm curious about that, and we could say we have doctrinal differences about what constitutes that centrality.

It's like, fair enough. And I would also not say that I understand what that centrality means. Like, so one of the ways I would understand that, let's say, is that in the Western tradition—and I don't know to what degree this is true in the Muslim tradition—one of the attributes of what Christ is psychologically is the logos.

And so if we're engaged in dialogue, which is dual logos, then we're embodying the spirit of something like mutual enlightenment. And that's then the presence of that spirit in the genuine confines of temporal reality, right?

It's something like the infinite descending to the finite to illuminate us. And to the degree that we can have a dialogue in good faith—which is also a religious notion—then we can engage in that process of dialogues, and that transforms and redeems us.

And then when I say, well, do I believe that? I say, well, it isn't just that I believe it as a proposition; it's that I can tell when it's happening, and so can you, I think.

It's like you're going to see that this conversation will ebb and flow. You know, and some of the time, it's going to grip you—think we're at the heart of the matter—and sometimes your attention is going to wander.

Your attention is going to wander when we're off the path. And so I would say that yes, in the degree that you and I are communicating, this is a religious way of thinking about it—is that we're doing our best to embody the spirit of the logos.

And if that's working, then we're making progress. And I know that in the Western tradition, that's part of what has been conceptualized as the fundamental attribute of the figure of Christ.

And I know that Christ is central in the Muslim tradition. And so one of the things I would want to know is not how we differ doctrinally, yeah?

Because I don't even think I'm qualified to debate you on that case. I got the guy here.

Well, you might have some things to say, but, yeah. But what I would like to know instead is why do you believe that the figure of Christ is central in some sense, or maybe I've got that wrong, although I don't think so.

Why do you think the figure of Christ is central both to the Muslim faith and the Christian faith? And what do you think that says about what we share in common?

Because I really don't understand that. It’s a mystery to me.

Okay, so Jesus Christ—if secular historians will look at him and differ on his existence or not, the majority to be fair do believe he existed, right?

Even second-hand stores, atheists on agnostics and whatever it may be, right? It’s the simplest explanation.

Yeah, it’s a simple, of course, yeah. So I believe that, first of all, Jesus Christ existed, which in the modern age is worth noting.

Right? Muslims actually—the only other major world religion who believe in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, as the prophet, right?

Yeah, this is a strange thing, so we should definitely be trying to sort that out, alright? So this is the first point of commonality: we believe in Jesus Christ.

We believe in his miracles that he cured the blind by God's permission, that he raised the dead with God's permission. We believe that he even, you know, he created some things, which in the Gospel of Thomas—nomish in the Bible—like, you know, but—for example, the clay bird, and so on, that he blew into it and it became an actual bird, that he killed the leper with God's permission.

We believe that he was one of the mightiest human beings that have ever lived on the earth, and we believe that his mother was the best woman who ever lived on the earth.

The Quran actually explicitly says that, and that seems like a good starting point, right?

And so that is the first thing we believe. When we look at the Quranic verses relating to Jesus Christ, we don't look at those metaphorically.

No orthodox Muslim normatively looks at those in an allegorical way. It's not physiology for us; it's history, so we believe that this is actually historical.

That's the first thing. And the reason why I mentioned that to you is because I listen to all of your biblical series. I think a lot of Muslims have, and yeah, a lot of people like it.

It’s because, obviously—strangely enough—and it's not very strange if you know the Quran, because the Quran actually tells us to go to the people of the book and to listen to them and to, you know, and you'll find an exegesis—like, for example, like one of the staple exegesis of the Quran; they use biblical verses all the time.

Let’s go to the people of the book; let’s see what information they have. A tabari mentions what you call it, which is basically passages from the Bible, passages from the Torah, and so on, like that from the biblical tradition and from the Torah.

So it’s not really—it’s not abnormal for Muslim people to be interested in Christian explanations. That’s been going on for 1,300 years.

Yeah, that’s the first thing. The second thing is that—why? Because symbolism is important, and you've mentioned, for example, Egyptian symbolism.

You mentioned, for example, Horus and Osiris and all this—not that Isis—but you know, the Egyptian goddesses, I have to make that very clear, and so on. Yeah, so my question would be, before we talk about symbolism—because a symbol can be something, you can have a symbol and an expression of something which exists at the same time.

For example, you can have something which is metal—not metaphoric, because you can’t have a metaphor and numbers, for example—but you can't have a symbol and something which doesn't. For example, I say that you are a symbol for Western—and whatever it is—intellectualism, yeah?

Possibly, I mean debate is Jordan Peterson a symbol for Western debate, um, and he exists. Now, here’s the point: like, you know, you know that there are central doctrines to Christianity like the crucifixion, the ascension, the resurrection and all the above, right?

These are doctrines. How do we look at these doctrines? Because the reason why I’m asking you, I think you are qualified, though. At least you have some—because you did mention in your lectures that you were taking the approach of the Alexandrian school, which is like Origen of Alexandria and his Jewish teacher fellow.

These kinds of people who take what you call the spiritualizing text; they spiritualize the text. They were known—the Alexandrian school was known for spiritualizing the text, and they were aborational in that sense.

And that's why, one of the reasons why they were seeing the theoretics by the—by all I think all the churches. The origin said some things which are heretical, but he has massive influence on Church fathers that are respected.

But you should do your point.

Yeah, the notion that facts have meaning is something that as Christians we should believe, yes, right? Is that God created the world with a meaningful structure.

So the world lays itself out in a way that when we see it, we can see them.

Exactly. And this is something which all types of Christians will agree with. Catholics will do, the Eastern Orthodox and Protestants—all of them will say, "You must believe in these doctrines as happening."

You cannot believe in them as symbol. You cannot believe—so the reason why this actually—so when I hear something like that, then the question that arises for me is, what do you mean happening?

And so let me just unpack that a little bit. So I did a lecture last night at the Apollo on the story of Cain and Abel, yes?

And one of the things that I proposed was that not only did that story happen, but it's always happening. Yes?

It always happened; it's happening right now, and it's always going to happen into the future. And so I would say to some degree the mere reduction of these profound stories to a historical reality is an underestimate of their truth.

Because they're a strange kind of truth because they're the truth that always happened and is happening now and always will happen. So you're thinking biblical story, for example, do you have—a story of the eternal battle between something like the spirit of joyful and appropriate sacrifice, which is characterizes Abel and the spirit of resentment against the structure of existence as a consequence of thrownness and the shaking of the fist at God.

And that's always happening because for all of us, you know, we look at our lives and we think, “Well should we be happy to be alive? Should we be grateful to be alive?” And the answer to that is often, but not always.

And if you put someone in the position of Job, and he's being tortured to death by fate and tragedy and catastrophe and malevolence, he might well come to a point where he's motivated to take the resentful path and shake his fist at God.

And we have those spirits inside of us warring constantly. And so when—and so then when I look at a story like Cain and Abel, I think, well—the question did that happen begs the question what do you mean by happen?

Because when you are dealing with fundamental realities and you pose a question, you have to understand that the reality of the concepts of your question when you're digging that deep are just as questionable about as what you're questioning.

You know? So people say to me, "What do you do? Do you believe in God?" And I think, okay, there's a couple of mysteries in that question. What do you mean by do? What do you mean believe? And what do you mean God? And you say as the questioner, "Well we already know what all those things mean except belief in God."

And I think, no, if we're going to get down to the fundamental brass tacks, we don't really know what any of those things mean.

And so for me, belief, for example, is often reflected not so much in proposition as it is in action. If I want to know what you believe, I could ask you, and hopefully, you have some idea about what you believe.

But I'd rather see what you do.

What can I—can I can I push back a little bit with this because, like, for example, when I was reading your book, your newest book, actually, “This Time”—

Yeah, it’s a very good book, by the way. I mean, I recommend them, honestly, and buy them if you haven't already bought them. It's—I would specifically recommend the “12 Rules for Life” because “12 More Rules,” I have some criticisms of it, but it’s good. It's a good book.

But one thing you did say about it—you were talking about some psychological theory, which—I forget what it is right now. You mentioned something.

You said this, you know, the problem with this such-and-such theory is that it doesn't have any evidence. Full stop, categorical.

All this—what you're doing now. You didn’t mention that. You didn’t say, "Well, it depends on what you mean by this," "It depends on what you mean by sorry to say again," but it depends on what you mean by—it's like you become postponed all of a sudden.

It’s like you become—now you’ve been—yeah, that’s a definite.

Oh yeah, that's a definite. Look, I think that's partly why the postmodern critique in some sense was inevitable is because we started to dig down into something like, say, the meaning of stories because that's really where the postmodernists got their impetus.

Because the post-modern literary theorists—sorry to drag this up, but it's relevant. They hit a mystery, which was, well, if you read a given text, story, or even a paragraph, and you get a hundred people to offer their opinion on it in some way, you get a hundred different opinions.

And you can tell that if you assign students to write an essay, let’s say, and so then a problem emerges as if, well, if there's a hundred different opinions and some of them even appear to oppose one another, how do you know what the true significance is of the text?

And then worse, how do you even know that there is a true significance? And then that—and then you think, okay, well, that's a major problem.

And then here’s a worse problem: imagine you have an assemblage of texts, like the biblical corpus, let's say, which is really a library, and it's in some sense canonical, right? Well, if you can decide on the fixed meaning of even a given paragraph, how in the world can you make the statement that this selection of texts which are much more complicated than just paragraphs is somehow canonical?

Now the answer to that is this—that is the answer: we don't know.

Now the problem with the postmodernists wasn't that they figured out that this was a mystery because not only is this the mystery of textual interpretation— which is a major mystery—how do we understand the text?

But it's also the mystery of perception because at the same time, people who are investigating perception—Jonathan has been talking about this with John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist—at the same time, scientists on the perceptual front in AI labs and neuroscientists were discovering that it’s so complicated to look at the world, which is to interpret the world, let’s say, that it isn't obvious that it's even possible, which is partly why we don't have autonomous robots—they can't see the world.

Now it’s easy for us because we just look at it, but that’s not so easy. And so, well, what’s the point of all this?

Well, the point of all this is that if you delve into questions deeply enough, you do run into the problem of perception and the multitude and multiplicity of perception, and that’s a real problem. And so when I do something like interrogate a question, well, the postmodern problem does emerge.

Now I've been trying to work out solutions to that, and Jonathan and I and John Vervaeke have been discussing this a lot.

The postmodernists were correct, I think, in their diagnosis of the problem. They leapt right to the idea that the way we solve the problem of perception is by exercising power.

They just took a Marxist story and said, "Well, there's the solution," but in particular, mostly the French intellectual types.

Yeah, I would disagree with this, by the way. I don't think the Derrida or Foucault took a Marxist position at all.

Well, Jonathan, you want to have that? That’s true, but that’s not my fight. It’s a worthless victory for me.

Are you sure? You have to talk about that?

No, no, I don’t care.

Okay, well, we can either delve into that or not, let me just say something.

And learn about what you were saying that is—I think that when there's this question of, “Do you believe in God?”, I think one of the problems that Jordan—no, yeah, the difficulty that Jordan faced was faced with a modern Protestantism which was very propositional and was like just, “I believe,” and it’s just a bunch of things that you believe in in terms of thinking.

And I do think that what Jordan is trying to grasp at and trying to understand is actually probably closer to something that most traditional Muslims would believe, which is that if you say that you submit to God, but you don't submit to God, then that word is—

And I agree with you!

Yes, I agree. So the question is, why is it empty? Right? If you said the words, why is it still empty?

And so I think that’s a really tough thing to drill down to is that, well, what's happening in the faithful community in some sense is that if the actions do not align with the truth of the faith, then that creates cognitive dissonance in some real way, which motivates action in and of itself. And that produces the possibility of—the transformative quality of faith, right?

Because if belief isn't matched by action in some real sense, it's not belief; it's just talk.

That's true. And if people act accordingly, and as I pointed out before, then you see if we act well, we can also create community.

We can also—we can move towards more love. We can also create more emotion and positive emotion as a consequence of shared purpose—and that shared purpose needs to come out of a transcendental unity—something above all else—something that we worship and to which we submit, as you pointed out earlier.

And I think we can meet at that juncture, and as a consequence, strengthen one another.

Yes, yeah, but for that reason, I think that as much as we go to—we can see eye to eye on—that we have to reiterate those feelings and regularly do so, honestly.

Absolutely.

So, I do appreciate you guys coming here today. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground and I know that everybody has things that they prefer or, you know, strict opinions on their ideas, and that is incredibly valuable to foster a strong environment—particularly today with the wide range of belief and value systems that we encounter.

So, looking forward to talking to you again.

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you.