Christianity could be a higher order way of organizing lives

[oskar]

Member when I name dropped Jordan Peterson because I was pretty sure that's where you got all that stuff from. In fairness I don't know all that much about him. I got through about 5 min. of the feminist thing you posted and there's probably nothing I'd disagree with there, but when it comes to german philosophers and psycho analysts he has his head waaaay up his ass. Waaaay up there, Morty.

Listening to him talk about Nietzsche is endearing and delightful, but he takes this stuff way too seriously. I was a really edgy teenager and I got pretty deep into Nietzsche. It probably wasn't until that one book where he goes on for ages about how all women suck and Wagner is best... I think it's Birth of Tragedy - that I realized maybe this is more humor than anything else. I mean that man wrote a book that consisted of chapters like: Why I'm so handsome. Why I'm so wise. And: Why I write such good books. It's all good fun, but you can't treat it like doctrine. What needs to happen is: Earnest Brecker needs to descend from a mountain and tell Jordan Peterson that Siegmund Freud is dead.

That whole thing that we are innately monsters is just demonstrably not true. If you look at isolated tribes they generally behave ethical within their group. You tend to behave ethically towards people you can expect to reciprocate. There's lots of murdering as well, but the people that get murdered are by large those you are not interacting with in a mutually beneficial manner.
Biologically this makes perfect sense. When two males fight over the right to mate - right then and there it makes more sense to kill your opponent. Your genes have a higher chance of survival that way. Problem is if you carry the behavioral phenotype for murdering sexual competitors, you're passing that on. That works great for one generation, but it's not a beneficial trait to have in the multi generational game. There are lots of more nuanced examples for the evolutionary benefits of all kinds of altruism, inter-tribal, inter-special or even across species (symbiosis).
I touched on this in the other thread. The thing to search for is game theory and evolution and there's lots of situations where GTO strategies are found in nature and those are also correlated to what we would consider moral behavior.

[wufwugy]

Member when I name dropped Jordan Peterson because I was pretty sure that's where you got all that stuff from.

JP is for sure a big influence on me, though there's much more than just "getting this stuff from him." I've been thinking about it for a while before JP ever hit the scene. JP has resonated with and articulates a good deal of what I was already moving towards.

his head waaaay up his ass. Waaaay up there, Morty.

i lold

Listening to him talk about Nietzsche is endearing and delightful, but he takes this stuff way too seriously.

I don't know Nietzsche. I know that JP says Nietzsche believed the Judeo-Christian roots of western civilization are dead (or soon to be dead), that this would cause great trouble, and that he spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how the West, that was built on God, could survive without God. Given JP's academic status and interactions with others of high academic status and that I've seen nobody call him on this even though he has said it many times, I just assume it is an accurate representation of Nietzsche. You know much more Nietzsche than I do, what do you think?

tell Jordan Peterson that Siegmund Freud is dead.

Jung is his boy. I can't recall if any of his ideas pivot on Freud, but Jung is very big for them.

That whole thing that we are innately monsters is just demonstrably not true.

I agree with the description you provided after this, and I think it is a part of the whole. When JP discusses being a monster, it is within the the type of framework from which Nazis derive or gulag prison guards derive or slavers derive. People like to romanticize how if they were in those situations, they would be one of the few fighting against the power. But that is simply naive. Germans and Soviets and Mao's cultural revolutionists and the Hutus and all these others were not any different kind of base human than we are. If we were in their shoes, chances are we would too be monsters.

[spoonitnow]

I don't know Nietzsche. I know that JP says Nietzsche believed the Judeo-Christian roots of western civilization are dead (or soon to be dead), that this would cause great trouble, and that he spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how the West, that was built on God, could survive without God. Given JP's academic status and interactions with others of high academic status and that I've seen nobody call him on this even though he has said it many times, I just assume it is an accurate representation of Nietzsche. You know much more Nietzsche than I do, what do you think?

Listen to Joe Rogan's podcast with Josh Barnett. Josh goes into Nietzsche a fair amount.

[oskar]

I don't know Nietzsche. I know that JP says Nietzsche believed the Judeo-Christian roots of western civilization are dead (or soon to be dead), that this would cause great trouble, and that he spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how the West, that was built on God, could survive without God. Given JP's academic status and interactions with others of high academic status and that I've seen nobody call him on this even though he has said it many times, I just assume it is an accurate representation of Nietzsche. You know much more Nietzsche than I do, what do you think?

I'd say that's an accurate representation of Immanuel Kant.
All the philosophers in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment dealt with that question. Kant famously in the Critique of Pure Reason, Schopenhauer, and obviously Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. I'm going to be super cynical because I'm not really equipped to talk about this. Kant was basically like: how can we do morals without scripture and tried to find moral truths through metaphysics. Nietzsche accuses him of thereby creating a pseudo-religion and claims those universal truths don't exist. While good and bad are useful terms, good and evil are not. Nietzsche goes on to basically say: evil is in the eye of the beholder.

If you want to know why I'm condescending to JP talking about FN as if he was relevant today, just go read a few pages of FN. Thus Spake Zarathustra is FN at his most readable. Beyond Good and Evil tries to expand on the concepts in a more serious manner, but it's still polemical, bombastic and nebulous writing. Anyone who claims to be able to interpret it in absolute ways is most likely talking out of his ass.
These guys came way before modern day genetics, neuroscience and sociobiology. They represent important stepping stones but to go back to them to try to explain morals is like going back to Lamarck to explain evolution.