Welcome to the Jordan V. Peterson podcast. In this week's compilation episode, we explore what happens when the religious instinct gets brushed aside and what fills that void instead.

And whether that's contributing to the breakdown of a society founded on the Abrahamic tradition, Nietzsche has his famous God quote,

God is dead, God remains dead and we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest has led to death under our knives? Who will wipe this blood off? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement? What sacred games shall we invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? The voices in this compilation may be very familiar since some of them also featured in the conceptualization of God series. You're about to hear from the whole spectrum through Jonathan Pazzo and Matthew Patrusik to Stephen Fry and Lawrence Kraus and more. I hope you're enjoying these compilations.

You know, the number of people that have become Christian because of you is hilarious. Sorry, it's not hilarious, but it's just kind of it's just kind of this strange thing because you you you kind of stand outside and you look at you're looking at the door and you're looking at the church and you're saying,

this isn't not so bad. You know, look at this. What is what is going on here? Like what is this about and then because of that? It's also do you think you've got something better? You know, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day when we were walking.

Because as I said, I walk about 10 miles a day right now trying to keep myself under control. And you know, he was raised a communist in Poland and and and then an atheist and he was complaining.

I think I think this is what he told me that he was complaining to his parents at one point about a religious wedding that they were going to.

Despite not believing and he said as he got older, he realized he had nothing to replace that with. It's like, OK, throw it out. Fine. OK, now where are you? Well, you're just as bad off as you were before, but you also don't have that beautiful thing.

Yeah, it's like what would happen if we dispensed with Christmas? Well, it's not job. It's a good thing. Let's get rid of Christmas.

Or we could say we could make it entirely secular, but then it would just disappear. But you know, that's not what's going to happen because religion is inevitable.

And we're seeing it coming back in very strained ways. It's going to be a weird, woke, identitarian religion, which is which is going to come back. That's why.

It's part of it's going to be a little bit of a problem. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Can you believe that? Yeah. So it's a scary thing. Like that's what you could say that that's one of the failures of the new atheists is that they led to the what they partly led to the new woke phenomenon because they didn't realize that you can't get rid of religion.

You can't get rid of rituals. You can't get rid of the problems and opportunities of identity. All of these things are going to come back. If you try to just if you try to brush them aside, then they're going to come back in varied, weird ways. And without you realizing what's going on, you'll have people kneeling to a shrine of a man who was killed by police and putting a halo on his head and, you know, and self mortifying themselves and doing all kinds of insane things or that look to you insane, but that you need to understand.

It's just this religious impulse gone gone off the rails. So.

Yes. And then the question is, what's the right place for it? That's right. You know, I've I've thought in my I suppose it's a form of comedy that Catholicism is as sane as people get.

You know, it's Baroque, right? And and and it's gothic and not Baroque. It's gothic. It's dark. It's it's it's it has the same aesthetic in some sense as a horror film. And I'm not being I'm not being I'm not saying something denigrating by that.

I mean, it's part of its strange mystery. And all that strangeness is necessary because people would be much more insane without it than they are with it.

It's a container for that religious impulse and that impulse is to the to the good.

Yeah. And and and the image of the of the crucified Christ.

And also the act of communion gathers in all the extremes together, right? It's like if you think of the symbolism of communion, you'll notice that it gathers in every extreme from the highest to the most transgressive all of it comes together.

It's worth unpacking that it's ritual cannibalism in the service of God.

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