Peterson : I’m an odd sort of Christian, I suppose, for a variety of reasons.... There is an idea of the Eternal Soul, and it tends in Christianity to remain somewhat gendered, although there is an idea that it’s the Logos that is redemptive for males and females...and Logos is symbolically represented as masculine. I think that’s because the masculine spirit, so to speak, is freer in some sense than the female spirit, because it’s more tightly tied to the necessity of procreation and so forth. It’s something like that.... Societies have posited for a very long period of time that there’s something about human consciousness that transcends the limitations of the finite self. And you also mentioned the use of psychedelics, and obviously that was part of your experience of discovery. There’s a reasonable amount of evidence, and most of it was compiled by a man whose name, if I remember, was Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist, a student of mushrooms... R. Gordon Wasson . And he claim
Frighteningly, I think sometimes it works *just that way*...
ReplyDeleteNice, but is the polemic really inevitable? I can't help but think of the difference between A. G. Dickens, Euan Cameron, and Eamon Duffy, on the one hand, and Diarmaid MacCulloch on the other. The former are engaged in the polemic (on different sides), while MacCulloch, I think, is beyond it. But then, his position as a gay, ex-Anglican, agnostic is unusual and, as he admits, contributes to his historiographical position. (Well, to be precise, it's the ex-Anglican and agnostic aspects that he admits as influences.)
ReplyDelete@Brian: Perhaps we don't always perceive it as polemic, but surely writing as a ex-anything suggests a particular interpretative position. I've tried to articulate a bit more clearly what's bothering me in today's post. Maybe it's that I don't buy anybody else's position but can't yet articulate mine.
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