(L)IMITATION OF CHRIST

The reason I have been listening to and reading Dr. Jordan B. Peterson of late is simple. He annoys me in a good way. I like his recent book, 12 Rules for Life. In my opinion, it is about time a thinking and self-critical person becomes a rock star on line. Not an antidote for mass distraction, but a good start. 

Dr. Peterson's implied religiosity is his most thought-provoking quality. I say "implied" because I don't really believe he is religious in the sense of dogma and ritual. I will admit the thought of Dr. Peterson kissing the Pope's ring is the stuff of nightmares for me. I hope I never see that in my lifetime. He may actually be a ritualistic believer of some ilk. That really matters little to me. 

I do get that this brainy man sees the value of religious traditions in preserving and transmitting better cultural values over the millennia. I don't have to cross myself or bend the knee to apply Christ's two basic commandments or Moses' ten. Nor would I don a silly hat and bow to the East at Dr. Peterson's command. In other words, I sometimes wonder how literally to take the good psychologist's references to "faith". 

After all, I studied Christianity long enough and deeply enough to arrive at the simple conclusion that imitating Christ's humility, outrage at corruption and compassion is the truly Christian way to go if I am not a hypocrite. The potential impact of the Christ message has been limited by being held hostage. It has been exploited by Roman and non-Roman mafias. Perhaps they see this as their piece of the action for passing on the tradition. However, it is likely the Christ of the New Testament would lash them down the street as he did with the merchants in the Temple of Jerusalem. 

Dr. Peterson likes using Christ imagery. I think he uses it poignantly and effectively when applying it to the individual human journey. Perhaps this 21st Century use of the Christ tradition is its best revival in recent times. It is a pleasant change from the ignorant born-again version, which advocates passive salvation in exchange for filling the coffers of a megachurch con man. That was just repackaging of the medieval Roman church. 

But I must get to Dr. Peterson's annoying bits. There are sizable parts of the Western traditional culture which simply stink in 2018. Some of these are deeply rooted in Christianity as it has evolved through the centuries. My most predictable annoyance is my absolute astonishment that Dr. Peterson himself conveys an implied judgment of homosexuals as less-than human beings. I have avoided the "h" word, which has become a slur rather than a descriptive. 

An intelligent argument could be made that Christ, as described, was himself homosexual in the cultural context of his time. He can certainly be seen without argument as socially homosexual, like many Orthodox Jews and Muslims of our day. My visit to Egypt in 1984 made this idea very credible to me. I was a consultant to Saudi royals. I was reviewing various residential psychiatric facilities around Cairo for my client. I visited several. Each one had a confined garden which was occupied by male inmates and their assigned caregivers. They were mostly walking along paths. Older caregivers of lower social status embraced or walked hand-in-hand with their charges, who seemed content with the arrangement. Healing through nurturance in an all male environment. As a gay male psychiatric nurse, I felt tremendously encouraged in my belief that a loving environment is one powerful therapeutic tool. 

But the social homosexuality of the Bible was rapidly hoarded away into clerical communities and priesthoods, largely populated by the lesser offspring of aristocrats. The impetus for earlier female inclusion was less about equality for women than breeding new followers quickly to avoid extinction by the status quo religions. We see this currently in worldwide Islam. A radicalized socially homosexual class is trying to take control of the religion. Their defensiveness, based in their own homosexual preference for companionship, is exemplified by throwing acknowledged homosexuals of the Western variety off roofs. 

The irony of Dr. Peterson's doggedly pro-heterosexual attempt to save the Western Logos is that it is there for him to save largely through the efforts of many brilliant and highly functional homosexual priests, monks and nuns. These stalwarts, not the Cardinals and Popes, lived in supportive community and spent their entire unrecognized lives transmitting tradition through handwritten documents in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. In fact, the case can be made that the printing press, while expanding the light on Christian ideas, also damaged the core communities which carried those ideas from generation to generation.

Believe me, I have not deluded myself into thinking that the neo-Marxist LGBTQ+ horde which deplore Dr. Peterson and his free-speaking intellectual peers have any greater appreciation of the legacy left by the homosexual stalwarts of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian tradition. Their ill-considered support of the backward aspects of Islam belies their inability to stand for anything principled or even self-preserving.  

One of the many reasons I, like some thinkers before me, have turned East to Buddhism is the thought system's general ignoring of gender and sexuality in its core teachings. The historic Buddha abandoned wife and child, cared for in privileged surroundings thereafter, to seek enlightenment, a state freed from identity politics of his day. The verbal transmission of the Buddha's message, like Christ's, was later undertaken by men and women living as social homosexuals. 

Disdain for actual copulation, especially leading to reincarnating birth, was part of the core message in those communities.  Yet, unlike Judaic-Christian-Islamic obsession with procreation leading to overpopulation, Buddhism is about individual evolution away from the focus of procreation and toward a focus of liberation from need and compassion for others. This is also known as less selfish service to society. The failure of peace-loving Buddhism in the face of weaponized Islam and Christianity in The East corrupted its long term effect on those societies. Perhaps the evolution of Buddhism in Japan after its flirtation with Western violence in WWII accounts for the recent drop in birth rates and liberation of young Japanese women. I would hope so. 

I would also hope that Dr. Peterson's respect for Western traditions might widen his view of those traditions. The great minds of Western tradition have not been exclusively heterosexual Libertarian capitalists. Most have struggled to science through the mire of institutionalized religion. Many of them were clerics. Some died in that struggle. Would Dr. Peterson rate a martyr to free thought and science a #1 (loser) on his lobster scale because that person happened to be an unmarried childless homosexual? Perhaps. If so, that would be cause for me to suggest strongly that he reconsider some of his biases when reviewing scientific data.