1. Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson debate. They see the West as having group identity around ideas (this is Americanism). The problem is that an idea is not a stable basis for group identity. You can abandon and reinvent it tomorrow. “Today I’m Christian, tomorrow I’m Buddhist..”
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3. Thirdly, if our collective identity only comes form ideas I don’t see why it is wrong for the “identity politics” types to have identity politics. This is politics based on ideas detached from everything else, not so different to Peterson & Shapiro.
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4. Is, for example, the family “just an idea”? I think the bonds are more powerful than that. And, in fact, we suffer when we treat all collective bonds as “just ideas”.
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5. Shapiro and Peterson, being good liberals, do not make their case to the public in religious terms. Shapiro admits he believes atheists can be moral. This opens the question: why be religious, if you do not believe your religion is better than liberalism?
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6. Once religion is constrained religion doesn’t go away, the public religion becomes liberalism or technocratic liberalism. Shapiro and Peterson are fighting, in the proponents of “postmodernism”, exactly what their own system creates.
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7. They say you must appeal to science in the public arena. This leads to scientism, but it is also an admission that, really, they believe science to be truer than their own religious convictions—apparently it speaks to everyone while religion in subjective.
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8. If science can speak to everyone and religion cannot, what, then, is the truer discipline? We must conclude it is science. Peterson and Shapiro are, in effect, scientists in the streets and believers in the sheets.
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End of conversation
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