Famed clinical psychologist and two-time author Dr. Jordan Peterson warned the graduates of Hillsdale College in Michigan on Saturday about the devil at the crossroads during his countercultural commencement address.
After thunderous and sustained applause, Peterson told the graduating class they are at a crossroads in life.
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A crossroads the metaphor works because you make a decision, he said. You go one direction or another. Theres an old blues idea that you meet the devil at the crossroads. I always wondered why that was I found it true. Its a really compelling idea. Its an image that has a good narrative fit, and it sticks in your memory once you hear it.
Its milestones like graduation, the 59-year-old mused, where people are forced to examine their consciences.
Why do you meet the devil at the crossroads? he asked rhetorically. And the answer is, most fundamentally, because when you come to a place in your life where you have to make a choice you aim up or down. And there is always an agent of temptation at every choice point, enticing you to aim down.
Peterson then turned to Scripture to explain how sin which he defined as missing the mark factors into the crossroads that punctuate people's lives.
To paint a word picture of aiming down, he referenced the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cains sacrifices, he said, were not everything that they could be and not in the service of the highest good. He added that, when people make insufficient sacrifices, we believe in the deepest part of ourselves that weve pulled one over God.
Peterson noted the English word sin found throughout the Old and New Testaments of the Bible comes from the Hebrew word khata, which is roughly translated as to fail or to miss the goal.
It implies that it has something to do with aim or the lack thereof, explained Peterson. I love that. Theres a variety of ways you can miss the mark, right? Dont aim at all thats a good one. Assume there is no such thing as aim. Assume all aims are equal.
Run From Pridefulness
One of the biggest obstacles that cause people to miss the mark repeatedly, he said, is pride.
Again, Peterson turned to Scripture, this time referencing the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, when, after the Flood, Noahs descendantswere overcome with prideand sought to build a structure to reach the heavens, failing to follow the Lords commandment to fill the earth (Genesis 1:28).
Its a continual temptation for human beings to build complex organizations that get too high, said Peterson. So what does that mean? How about too many layers? Not local enough, not distributed enough, right? Too separate from the people that they serve. Its also a Luciferian story. Lucifer is this spirit of intellect the light-bringer whos flown too high and challenges God Himself, and falls. Its a symbol of prideful intellect. And it is the prideful intellect that raises itself up against what is most properly placed at the highest place which is what God is.
Im very opposed to the idea that the fundamental human motivation is power which is pretty much what every student is taught at every level of their education, in every educational institution except a handful across your country, he continued. Its such a dismal philosophy. You could not formulate a more pathological philosophy. It obliterates your faith in society, and it eradicates the notion of the individual. It removes the notion of good faith and goodwill, and it makes communication impossible.
Rather than allowing arrogance to disturb ones aim, Peterson told the graduates they should see the pursuit of what is right and good as practical.
By practicing any good in any rigorous sense, and making the proper sacrifices in that direction, you simultaneously learn to approach the good that is the sum or the essence of all those proximal goods, he told them. The essential insistence in Christianity is that the good that unites all those goods is the same good thats reflected in the image of Christ, which is an image of acceptance of the suffering of life, and the necessity of serving the lowest as the highest calling.
The truth of Jesus, he added might be more true than anything else.
Faith Is Courageous
In what is certainly a countercultural message, Peterson a great intellect in his own right esteemed the graduates to disabuse themselves of the secular suggestion that having faith means abandoning logic and reason.
The world will tell people faith is a form of weakness because it implies an unwillingness to contend with that which cannot be explained, the difficult and dark corners of life. Peterson, however, told the Hillsdale students he doesnt believe that is the case.
One of the things Ive thought a lot about in relationship to faith we have this idea, and its not a good idea, and its certainly an idea for which religious people are often pilloried that faith means the sacrifice of reason and the willingness to believe things that are patently not true, he said. [I] dont think thats what faith is at all in some fundamental sense. I think faith is a form of courage.
If youre hurt by life and you will be its understandable that you might react in a nihilistic and hopeless fashion, the psychologist continued. [A]nd I think part of what helps you through that is faith. And part of that faith is that its incumbent on you to maintain faith in the fundamental goodness of existence, including your own, despite the evidence to the contrary.
When one faces trials, Peterson said he or she ought not to give in to despair. Instead, those staring down a difficult crossroads should rise up in courage and see if you can resist going down the wrong path.
Its better for you, and its better for the people around you, he said.
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Jordan Peterson Tells Graduates Faith 'Is a Form of Courage, 'Warns Them of the 'Devil at the Crossroads' - CBN.com