Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description.

Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at self-authoring.com. This episode of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast is the first of a 12-part series on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

It's entitled Introduction to the Idea of God.

Dr. Peterson will be performing the remainder of the lecture series every Tuesday, throughout the remainder of the summer at the Isabel Mater Theatre in Toronto.

You can find tickets for future events in this Biblical series in the description of this episode or at Jordan B. Peterson.com.

Slash Bible Dash series.

Well, thank you all very much for coming. It's really shocking to me that you don't have anything better to do on a Tuesday day.

No, seriously though, it is. I mean, you know, it's very strange in some sense that there's so many of you here to listen to a sequence of lectures on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories.

It's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but it still does surprise me that there's a ready audience for it.

Well, so that's good. So we'll see how it goes.

I'll start with this because this is the right question. The right question is why bother doing this. And I don't mean why should I bother doing it?

I don't have my own reasons for doing it, but you might think, well, why bother with this strange old book at all?

And that's a good question, you know.

It's a contradictory document that's been cobbled together over thousands of years. It's outlasted kingdoms, many, many kingdoms.

It's really interesting that turns out that a book is more durable than stone. It's more durable than a castle. It's more durable than an empire.

And that's really interesting, you know, that it's something in some sense so evanescent can be so long living.

So there's that. That's kind of a mystery. I'm approaching this whole scenario.

The biblical story is as if they're a mystery fundamentally because they are. There's a lot we don't understand about them.

We don't understand how they came about. We don't really understand how they were put together.

We don't understand why they had such an unbelievable impact on civilization.

We don't understand how people could have believed them. We don't understand what it means that we don't believe them now or even what it would mean if we did believe them.

And then on top of all that, there's the additional problem, which isn't specific to me, but it's certainly relevant to me that no matter how educated you are, you're not educated enough to discuss the psychological significance of the biblical stories.

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