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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

His position regarding a lot of religious topics seems tainted by his personal beliefs.

He makes frequent reference to judaeo-christian archetypes, which seems to me to grossly overstate the relevance of the belief systems.

The fundamental archetypes represented in the human mind are far older than any current form of religion, to the extent that there's overlap then either the archetypes have been co-opted, or have been overlaid with a culturally mediated avatars.

I don't think that you ever find him framing those underlying structures in a way that does not tie back to Christ.

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> which seems to me to grossly overstate the relevance of the belief systems.

It is hardly possible to overstate the relevance of those archetypes and beliefs. Nothing else has been more widespread on earth for as long to have anywhere close to the same influence on humanity.

I do not mean in terms of pervasiveness - I mean in terms of them innately making up a piece of the underlying structures of human consciousness.

And to the extent that those beliefs are actually archetypal, they are not fundamentally judaeo-christian but predate and have been co-opted by those religions.

I'm not familiar enough to know what a "Judeo-Christian archetype" is, but Indian/Chinese origin religions are older, just about as numerous, and not particularly similar.

(Where Buddhism is similar, it's because "religion" as a concept had to be made legible to Westerners when they showed up so they wouldn't colonize you so hard, and they did this by putting Western philosophy in it.)

Things like the virgin mother (bare in mind, much like Peterson, I'm pulling this out of my arse).

My take on that it is a perspective based subset of actuality; in the case of the mother (as opposed) to the wife, 'she' is measured from the perspective of the child, she has her nurturing capabilities but not those of reproduction.

Reproduction is outside of the child's need to understand, and is not a property of the mother as it is seen from the child's perspective.

Bare in mind that the archetype is always perceived by the child, the husband will see something else.

These restrictions are based on perspective and need, and are reflective only of a limited subset of reality.

Christianity has taken that childish abstraction, and declared it to be an actual thing, that actually existed.

It doesn't take much consideration to understand that virgins don't give birth to sons (and if they ever give birth to daughters, they'll be genetic clones of the mother).

This is a tongue in cheek response to your interesting reply: it is certainly possible now scientifically for virgins to give birth to sons.

> Where Buddhism is similar, it's because "religion" as a concept had to be made legible to Westerners when they showed up so they wouldn't colonize you so hard, and they did this by putting Western philosophy in it.)

Reworded: Where Buddhism is similar, it's because Westerners showed up and were going to colonize anyone who didn't have something called a "religion", so they had to turn it into a recognizable "religion", which they did by copying a bunch of Western philosophy. So the older forms were even less similar.

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