The Hebraic god was something completely unprecedented

It's easy enough to just make up your own ideas about things like Bible stories and traditions that shaped the course of human civilization. Everybody and their sixteen uncles has done that, and most of it is gibberish not worth the time it takes to read. What we have with the Exodus seminar is a group of Bible scholars of different faiths, some Jewish and others not, presided over by a clinical psychologist who seems to have an uncanny knack for discovering the deep psychological truths contained in these stories, and he's been studying the Bible for many years and bringing to bear all his own knowedge of psychology as well as that of Jung and other great thinkers of the past who subjected it to similar treatment.

What I write in here about it is just some of the 'tip of the iceberg' ideas that I want to remember or develop a little bit before they slip away into the memory hole. My little post above was just a distillation of a small part of a two hour presentation that went way deeper than can be gleaned from just reading my post. But Peterson is interested in the Bible partly as psychology, partly anthropology, and part many other things, all of which were in the very early process of being discovered in those Old Testament days and then tested through deep time by being codified as law and ritual that formed the basis of the civilization that was foundational in many ways to our own.

And as I've said a few other times in here, often the ideas revealed through the prophets have the qualities of dreams. They're mysterious, profound, and often difficult to understand at the time, and must be put into practice through methods like ritual or law before we can begin to understand them. Or in the case of dreams we often need to write them down and ponder them for some time at great depth before we can begin to unravel what they mean. A shallow analysis reveals shallow and often pointless meaning that isn't meaning at all. As Dr. Peterson has said many times, a civilization has many stories at different levels of profoundness, and the religious stories are the most profound ones that have withstood the test of millennia. The ones that, when adopted, formed the basis of the civilization itself.

It seems clear to me that the process of unraveling and coming to understand these profound ideas is still ongoing. In the beginning we had no way to understand them except to turn them into ritual and practice them for centuries or millennia, and gradually learn the truth by living it. This was true about sacrifice—the idea came to our ancestors and at first they had to act it out by actually making sacrifices, in some cases of living people. And as time went on we became able to abstract out the idea at the core of sacrifice—that if we're willing to give up something valuable now, it can bring dividends in the future. For instance by working hard rather than just relaxing or living for nothing but hedonism in the pleasure of the moment. We couldn't understand that concept in its fullness at first, it had to be practiced as ritual for many centuries before we developed the concept into something that wasn't purely physical in nature.

And this is the way the rest of it works too. Acheiving psychological and social unity is not a step backwards. But there's no need for me to argue with every stray post that pops up in here. My purpose with these posts isn't to try to convince anybody of anything, it's largely just to get my own thoughts down, partly as I said so I can remember them, and partly to help me work through them in this long, ongoing exegesis.

As a civilization we've reached a point of unprecedented understanding of the human mind. We now know about the unconscious, something that eluded our grasp until a little over a century ago. This allows us to understand both dreams and Bible stories in a much deeper way than ever before. What once could only be expressed in religious terms can now be seen in a more comprehensive light, though of course it must be unravelled carefully, so as not to just impose our own ideas of the moment onto it. We do that, of course, but in time we can see the mistakes and hopefully correct them and get closer to understanding these great riddles at the heart of our culture and our very being. Profound dreams can keep revealing new levels of meaning over years, over a lifetime in fact, and the most profound, the ones that affect entire societies, can keep revealing more meaning for millennia if studied with proper care and attention.