379 - You’re Not That Different From Your Political Opponents

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the past few decades we have heard from the new atheists just how horrible religion is, that religion is responsible for all these terrible things like the inquisition and witch burnings - but what if I told you that there are patterns or structures behind this kind of behaviour that are simply human, and are not unique to religious people, nor to your ideological or political opponents, but exist fundamentally in all identities.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/SQSDCcFKSrQ

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The Symbolic World Goes to Middle-earth! Join Richard Rohlin for his new course on Tolkien and Universal History. As always patrons at the Involved tier or higher qualify for a 10% discount. Apply your unique discount code at checkout. Read more here: https://www.thesymbolicworld.com/courses/tolkien-and-universal-history
In his famous Letter #131 to Milton Waldman, J.R.R. Tolkien described his Legendarium as an attempt to create a vast cycle of stories. These stories would be dedicated to his home country and as such this concept has often been described by Tolkien scholars as a “Mythology for England.” This course will take this concept a step further by examining the Legendarium as an attempt at a work of Universal History, one which uses both ancient and modern storytelling genres to reconcile conflicting visions of English, European, and Western identity. We will then apply those methods to contemporary storytelling efforts, revealing how Tolkien opens the way to a return to cosmological and legendary Christian storytelling tradition.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	it has nothing to do with the ideology behind it.
0:03.6	It has nothing to do with the idea that, oh, these religious people, they made this happen.
0:08.6	And it's because of religion.
0:10.0	Well, if you think that, then you'll be ignorant to the way in which your own ways of thinking
0:15.2	and your own excesses could bring about the exact same thing.
0:26.6	And sometimes, especially now, sometimes worse in both ways because of technology and because of the power of technology. Now we have access to way more excesses on each side. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. One of the accusations that you heard from the new atheist in the past few decades is, of course, how horrible religion is and how religion has done these things, like the Inquisition, like the witch hunts, the witch burnings, the oppression of difference, the oppression
1:14.4	of minorities, the oppression of other religions, all of these types of accusations that
1:19.3	you hear that religion is part of it. But what if I told you or what if we consider that in
1:27.1	fact all of these behaviors are actually just aspects of human behavior.
1:32.5	They're aspects of the human microcosm of how humans interact with each other, and that they can be found everywhere and anywhere at every single time.
1:51.0	And so I think that this way of understanding, which is that there are certain patterns of being, and those patterns of being, they play themselves out in people, they play themselves out in societies,
1:57.0	and they are just reflections. And they're reflections of usually the symbolic pattern,
2:04.3	which is the way in which the multiple and the one joined together. They are reflections of how it is
2:10.1	that multiple people can participate and become one at a higher level, that is a societal level.
2:16.8	The same thing in yourself,
2:18.1	that is how all these thoughts, how all of these body parts, how they can all join together
2:23.3	and be one person, that most of the things that people criticize religion for, they are
2:29.5	simply aspects of the symbolic pattern applied to different spheres.
2:36.6	And so sometimes those aspects, they go wrong or they become excessive, you know,
2:41.6	and then they have to be balanced out with other aspects.
2:45.1	And those can happen, by the way, at both sides.
2:48.2	You know, we accuse, for example, religion of being oppressive and harsh and judging
	...

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