A conversation with Paul Vanderklay about Religious Sensemaking & Criticism
Added 2023-06-16 02:40:07 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
Some of you may remember the conversation Matt and I had a month or so ago with John Vervaeke at the Stoa. This is something of a followup with another person active in the religious sensemaking ecosystem.
Paul Vanderklay is a sensemaking inclined pastor with a YouTube channel. The other person present is Andrea from the Andrea With The Bangs channel. Andrea is someone who developed an interest in Jordan Peterson but then came to value some of the critical commentary offered on his views including from Matt and me. We've been on her channel twice to discuss the podcast. She invited me to talk to Paul in part I think to help address some dissonance she experiences with how critical I am towards people whose religious insights she values.
Rather inevitably the conversation is a bit navel-gazey at times and I am afraid that I was not at my best in terms of coherence and being succinct. I was also, due to my own bad choices, operating on 2 hrs of sleep which wasn't the best idea. Nonetheless, I do think some interesting points were covered and that towards the end we got into rather substantial areas of disagreement.
I'm curious to hear what any of you think. Bearing in mind it is 3hrs long and this is the raw unedited video from Paul's recording. It won't be out as Decoding the Gurus content- but thought some of you might be interested.
Comments
Reassured by the responses above, not just me that felt Andrea and Paul suffered an irony bypass spending 3 hours trolling Chris for being the mean man of twitter. Still, JBP would be pleased to know it eased the pain of tidying my bedroom/house. Not sure how fruitful any of these theist/ atheist discussions can ever be academically when the theist starting point effectively disqualifies them. Antithetical to the scientific method if you begin with the rationale that your belief is correct and everything downstream needs to bend to fit your conclusion. An atheist simply requires a falsifiable proof. The only cogent out I’ve come across (in my shallow nonprofessional excursions) are the post-Popperian Bayesian confirmationist String Theory devotees. Although coming from completely different perspectives, I don’t know if both ultimately are guilty of the same magical thinking. Anyway, hats off to Chris for bearing with. But I guess his chosen specialism would be quite a challenge without the endless patience!
Polysurf
2023-06-27 17:15:20 +0000 UTCI got through each patronizing, I-am-listening-to-the-sound-of-my-own-voice, rudderless, let-me-tell-YOU-something, IDW-curious microsermon by dissociating a bit.
quirkformity
2023-06-23 06:23:16 +0000 UTCI didnt get this guy at all.
Colin Fardey
2023-06-20 11:52:33 +0000 UTCI'd love to hear more! I assume you (Chris?) disagreed as an anthropologist? I exchanged maybe 2 e-mails with him, hoping to discuss the AI arguments from his other book (Dark Matter of the Mind?), but he stopped replying. What are your thoughts on recursion in Piraha language (his debate with Chomsky)?
Tomasz
2023-06-19 03:23:32 +0000 UTCYes, I did try to emphasise this point. A lot of the lost boys flocking to Peterson-style analysis of biblical symbology are incapable of considering things like the actual history of religious conservatism and opposition to LGBT rights.
Christopher Kavanagh
2023-06-19 00:25:46 +0000 UTCI know Everett and even had a run in with him back in the day in a comment section!
Christopher Kavanagh
2023-06-18 09:11:28 +0000 UTCThe missionary losing his faith in the Amazon, mentioned by Paul, was Daniel Everett - and I highly recommend the book: Don't sleep there are snakes. The sad thing is, Paul distorts the story, as one of Everett's discoveries is that Piraha do not believe in gods or have any sort of religion, due to peculiar nature of their language. Probably the only known tribe like that.
Tomasz
2023-06-18 07:59:24 +0000 UTCYeah, I liked Vanderklay. He made clear arguments, unlike some of the Sensemakers who just say meaningless things using abstractions and metaphors where ironically you hurt your brain trying futilely to make sense of them.
Daniel
2023-06-18 01:18:11 +0000 UTC"Decoding" makes for a nice title but I can see how someone like Vanderklay could be misled. He seemed to expect you to explain Peterson's ideas, which I'm sure he felt were rich and interesting, and to explore in depth what Peterson was talking about. You do that sort of decoding to some extent--you try to recapitulate the gurus' ideas in plain language. But more than that it seems to me you guys do rhetorical analysis, criticism of their content, and examination of guru- and cult-like dynamics. So Vanderklay didn't get much out of your podcast because he wanted something different out of it.
Daniel
2023-06-18 01:05:52 +0000 UTCLol " I listened to understand what Jordan Peterson was talking about, and I still don't understand!" It's like he missed the primary takeaway from the podcast that these gurus really aren't saying anything, but of course he's on Peterson's side so that can't be the conclusion. Overall though this guy was at least more personable and understandable compared to his religious sense making brothers
Nick Brouwer
2023-06-17 18:52:50 +0000 UTCOy. After listening to Vanderklay's remarks about how leaving Christianity is good at first and it's liberating to live without Christian sexual ethics but it gets harder over the longer term, I am in this comic - https://xkcd.com/386/ The DTG comments aren't the place for my sob story so I might edit this out later but both my parents are committed Christians. As long as I can remember, their relationship has been an unhappy cocktail of incompatibility and abuse. However, as they believe that divorce is sinful/a moral failing, they remain married. Over the longer term, they're still miserable and I spent most of my 20s dealing with diagnosed PTSD. That's before we even get to what I've seen Christian LGBT people go through - many of them wanted to stay within the faith and left because they felt it was either that or suicide - all of them have found it easier, over the longer term, to live away from religious communities who regard their way of loving as a form of immorality. I'm a nobody in the comments section but I would GLADLY argue that point with Vanderklay. People come back to him talking about hardships because they're a part of the human condition and at some point most of us (including Christians) experience once that we struggle to reconcile ourselves to.
Artemis Green
2023-06-17 03:21:40 +0000 UTCYeah me too - it's interesting how people put form over substance when it comes to civility. Like I would say what is really uncivil/'mean' is a person using their platform of millions to scare people out of accessing life-saving vaccines for unscientific reasons. A strongly worded clapback really pales in comparison to the meanness of that. imp. And it's not 'mean' to strongly critique people spruiking harmful pseudoscience - I'd call it a kind of fierce compassion (to possibly trigger Chris with a westernized Buddhist term) - because it's done in an attempt to limit the danger posed to human life by anti-vaxx theories. Why are the feelings of the gurus more important than people's actual bodily health, you know?
Artemis Green
2023-06-17 02:14:58 +0000 UTCI found the section around ~2:20:00 with the two of them kind of policing your twitter/the podcast's tone unbelievably frustrating. Also, Vanderklay saying he hasn't learned anything through listening to several episodes I found personally insulting lol, implies he probably wasn't quite being as charitable to DtG as he's criticizing you for not being toward the likes of Pageau.
Brendan Smith
2023-06-16 17:53:45 +0000 UTCSorry the demon stuff is silly and can be dangerous. It can be used to let us off the hook for doing bad things or worse leads us to do bad things. I am glad you addressed this. I was a Christian.
Tim Tripp
2023-06-16 16:04:10 +0000 UTCOh I don't! There was a demonic amount of sense being made. I am now working on a "name check CS Lews" drinking game.
Allan Malcolm McPherson
2023-06-16 13:38:02 +0000 UTCDon’t blame me. I am a mere pawn in the sensemakers sense making.
Christopher Kavanagh
2023-06-16 13:32:07 +0000 UTCThis brought me back to first year university and 2 am conversations at a 24 hour Cafe. Is that a compliment? You decide!
Allan Malcolm McPherson
2023-06-16 12:08:19 +0000 UTCMy apologies! I felt I was a bit waffley myself though... so can't throw stones.
Christopher Kavanagh
2023-06-16 08:47:35 +0000 UTCThis was a bit annoying to listen to. The weird reasoning by annecdote and the constant nonfalsifiable claims by Paul made this really painful to listen to. The fact that he never answers a question even close to directly (like about Pageus love for Jones) is also a huge red flag that he mostly rambles rather than actually discusses. In all 3/10 would not listen again
Klas Bergholtz
2023-06-16 08:42:06 +0000 UTCA sleep deprivation waffling disclaimer, huh. Well I’m ready for some dream time myself; I’m going in….
Jon Hand
2023-06-16 07:36:13 +0000 UTC
