Doctor Scratch wrote: ↑Tue Dec 15, 2020 10:25 pm
The hill that DCP repeatedly insists on dying upon is this whole idea that you can be both smart/well-educated *and* you can still believe in Mormonism. So much of his life and his Mopologetics have been devoted to trying to advance that argument, and I can only guess at the depths of insecurity that are behind that particular obsession. You have to laugh, though: I mean, they are basically in a pissing match over whether William Lane Craig is smarter than Christopher Hitchens, which is the sort of argument you would expect the Comic Book Guy from
The Simpsons to make.
An interesting point, because in one way it seems that this can only be the right hill for any religious believers. You don't need to insist that non-believers can only be fools, but you don't want to accept that all believers have to be fools, either. Given that believing professors exist, you can hardly blame them for persistently claiming that they have a right to exist.
Yet you're right that listing an all-star team of smart believers is ludicrous. It does seem insecure. So something's somehow gone funny.
I don't think it can just be that Peterson is stuck defending the general respectability of religious belief, because there's no need to get insecure or silly over that. It's not a high bar to clear, especially in the academic world, where anybody is entitled to believe what they want as long as they're not hurting anybody else over it.
Maybe the problem is that Peterson wants more respect for his particular Mormon beliefs than most educated people are willing to give. He's not content with being tolerated as a harmless eccentric. He wants more than that.
I think you could get more respect for some form of Mormonism if you disavowed the historicity of the Mormon scriptures and the authority of the Mormon hierarchy, but insisted that Mormonism had some interesting and original ideas. I think Kishkumen here does that, for instance. I'm not necessarily convinced but I'm certainly not appalled that any scholar would think that. It's a respectable view, in my view.
It's got to be tough to get more than eyebrow-raised tolerance, though, if you're really upholding the whole LDS deal. Maybe the bottom line is that to believe all of that you really do have to be some kind of fool, even if you're not stupid, and insisting you're not a fool just makes the foolishness obvious.
Fredo Corleone wrote:I’m smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!
I was a teenager before it was cool.
