Well, I don't wanna get into a discussion about Peterson. I quoted him as a response to a comment Craig made. His work is probably useful to some people and not to others. I really dug the Maps of Meaning series though. He's kind of an enigma with the way things have played out.

Have you seen this? Really funny.

So did anyone ask?

Why do you think that someone is sacrificing their highest potential by—I'll use your word—"surrendering?" The highest good that I can see is that of self-sacrifice. I could be kind, give money to charity and visit the sick, but those all fall short of voluntarily suffering myself and letting others know they're not alone.

When you come across a hungry person, they don't need you to practice self-sacrifice ... they need food and it is moral to provide it. If you slashed a couple fingers off, or denied yourself food, or flogged yourself with a whip ... not so moral. The doctrine of self-sacrifice is a giant poetic dramatization that is impractical as a concept in the real world. If you help someone because you value doing such things, that isn't self-sacrifice, it's self-expression. If I value others wellbeing, respect their suffering, and have a humane impulse toward them, and them toward me, none of that is self-sacrifice ... just the opposite it is acting on the values of yourself. If a parent goes to great lengths for their children, they didn't sacrifice themselves -- they enacted love and caring as an expression of the values of their self.

Only when we get to the over-the-top story telling of: "Look, I slaughtered the whole human race once, and I'm going to have to do it again if I don't send a piece of myself down there and sacrifice perfection to cover sin" ... only then is the idea of self-sacrifice even very coherent. At that point, we destroy something valuable (IN THE STORY) for something infinitely less valuable. This is only sensible in make believe supernatural superstitious scenarios from a culture in which saviors were a dime a dozen.

Take the extreme case of a soldier jumping on a grenade. In that example they did give up their life, but it isn't any more moral than if he could have saved them without costing his life. It isn't the "sacrifice of himself" that makes it moral. It is the helping of others. That of course too is contingent. If the others are Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Bundy ... not so moral.

Sacrifice is not the measure of morality. And when someone surrenders their agency to whatever entity, real or imagined, THAT is the self-sacrifice that is behind much immorality.

The kind of self-sacrifice I'm talking about has to do with transcending suffering by voluntarily choosing it. Yes, I think it's good to help the hungry by giving them food, but the "help" I'm talking about has to do with the health of the soul and the capacity to overcome the internal afflictions that life throws our way. If one doesn't lead by example, they are of little or no help in this respect. It is an act of love, and the sacrifice one makes is unique to that individual.

If someone has promised your loved ones paradise + salvation, but has gone missing and has failed to deliver, what do you do?

The fullest image of self sacrifice is -> self perfection + self destruction.

For the saved, self destruction draws forth the savior, so that he must deliver on his word. Self perfection forces the savior to come quickly, snatching away any justification he can use against you to delay (refer to how long Jesus delayed in saving Lazarus).

Sacrifice has rightly been associated with fire (burnt offerings) and killing. Self sacrifice is standing in front of the righteous judge, not as the innocent sheep, but as the goat who is thrown into the everlasting fire of hell. Self sacrifice is to undermine all of your previous righteousness and become the grim reaper in the way Abraham does to Isaac.

This level of faith is only for those who are unwilling to take no for an answer and who are truly willing to get their hands dirty. It is unbecoming of anyone who is of the light and is therefore forbidden.

Can you further explain this? How does this relate to our interaction from earlier? The Abraham analogy has me a bit confused.

The desire for justice comes later and it turns self sacrifice into something more extreme. Self sacrifice as an act of love and form of leadership is sufficient. As long as self sacrifice includes leadership (preparing the way for others), then it is meaningful and avoids the meaningless self sacrifice FG objects to.

Matthew 19:17
King James Version
17 And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

He will give you the Holy Spirit if you ask him for it (God, Jesus' Father), he is good.

Ephesians 1:13
King James Version
13 In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,

You can be sealed if you believe and whatnot, I think. But if you ask he will give you it, which happened for me, I think. This is from the internet so it might not be correct, but it might be the same words as the Holy Bible. (the KJV - the Holy Bible)

The desire for meaning, if you engage it deeper and deeper, while rejecting unfulfilling meaning, will lead you to the self sacrifice I’ve described.

This first requires the cultivation of an unbreakable bond with the self. A self sacrifice which involves death is both a conscious willingness to betray and to be betrayed. You have to be able to embody both sides of the Abraham + Isaac scene.

What I mean is that you descend into death and become death in order to defeat death because a parasite that can no longer suck life from its host cannot persist. Death is then cleared out from the inner world of the body, allowing the entire self to be fully reunited with the soul in new life.

A parasite of life can eat its dead host and make the host come back to life.

What if the spirituality of mankind is not based on legends of an itinerant 1st Century preacher, on a culture that claimed, "Hey, we are god's chosen people and it is holy for us to enslave and genocide the peoples around us?" What if a "magical stand in scapegoat for a weekend story" is nothing but one of the myriad of religious tales so predominant in human history? And what then if we are left with the realities of nature, of human nature, of human consciousness? What then?

What if someone else had an epiphany along these lines instead of the canned religion stuff? That epiphany, that spiritual experience, is simpatico in some sense with other epiphanies, so we don't get to say, "Well, you aren't in our religion, so we get to assume you have no clue how to hear an epiphany story." That's a ridiculous level of bias and ignorance to what the actual situation is, and one that is assumed as an apologetic strategy.

You made basically this exact post several years ago when you first began posting on this sub forum. You’re going in circles. If not, explain how you determine progress and how you’ve made progress.

If it was true then, it's true now. Going in circles is like: "I'm a religious authority, I am revealing the mind of the creator ... why? ... because I am. Can't you hear me spieling religious sophistry? What else could I be but a messenger of god? Why would I need anything but that presumption to convince you?"

Meanwhile untold millions of others do the same thing for some other god, all ipso facto presumed as self-evidently true and real.

To me, spirituality is based on the nature of human consciousness, not on first century magical tales, which means it is a measure of one's connection to oneself, to life, and to the world, versus alienation from it and the emptiness that engenders. It is experiential along the lines of worth, value, meaning, fulfillment ... as opposed to emptiness, despair, shame. That is to say it is about one's "spirits" in the very natural sense. Of course religions in a superstition rampant time hijacked these simple spirits into supernatural incarnate spirits, devils, god sacrifices, etc.

Read about the things that were believed to be true in the 1st Century, and you have the answer as to who is stuck in a holding pattern of ignorance in the name of religion.

That you both deny your soul and treat me with suspicion is not a coincidence..

All the supernatural / God / devil stuff is accessed through the soul, so by refusing to wrestle with it at all, you are rejecting the soul.

The problem is that the quality, meaning, and fulfillment you desire is also accessed through the soul. You are actively rejecting what you need to fulfill your desire. What you are allowed to experience without the soul are counterfeit, short lasting versions of fulfillment which turn you into an addict needing another fix.

It’s a terrible strategy to live a life where you deny your soul; you can’t make any progress. All you can do is survive by constantly consuming meanings made of mainly empty calories.

I mean, how many of the ‘Atheist OWNS a Christian’ debates can you consume before they lose meaning?

Yeah it's all in the soul. It's just that the soul isn't the supernatural thing the goat herding illiterate superstitious blood sacrificing barbaric bigots thought it was. OF COURSE religion hijacked the word into supernatural lala land ... that's what religion does. But when "soulful" just means profoundly and deeply emotional, touching deeply on our humanity ... then that's where its happening. In the self, in the self that is that is not alienated and emptied of its experiential value by all the human tricks (repression, denial, addiction, diversion, dissociation, neurosis, escape, self-deception). That's where the soul is.

I see the whole "life after death" idea as kind of a red herring. Everything we think, say, write, are ... is all indelibly recorded in the quantum fields. It isn't going anywhere and does not or cannot dissolve. Perhaps it is on the surface of the hologram in black holes. "Is my body going to the streets of gold" is such an inane version of this question, well, it's worthy of the place from which it came.

And so life is quite the wrestling with this soul when one is not using religion to escape the whole thing and have some magical stand in do the job for them. Hello. Whoops. "No, no, no ... it can't be any of that scientific stuff. It's the goat herders and the magic story and the blood drinking. They had it all the metaphysics of the world figured out in the 1st century, as evidenced by how accurate all their other beliefs were."

I'm sorry. Magic souls don't fill in for the real spiritual work.

From where do you get the authority to claim that the soul is not supernatural?

From a lot better place than you get the authority to be a spokesman for god or the claim that there is a god or what that god is.

So has anyone asked? I guarantee you if you ask he will give you his Spirit.

The hard part is holding on.

Have you realized the way the Holy Spirit associates itself with deep meaning? Because once this is revealed to you, the HS expects you to remember this truth.

To know the HS is to be aware of how it callously, in an uncompromising way, filters the many out for the sake of the one. Still, the Son of Man is impossible to deny.

One of the deep truths of the soul which must be tested is the idea that the child will never be separated from the mother. The spirit of the father wants your full trust, so it will require you to rip paradise (the mother) away from the child.

How can the child be both separated from the mother and not separated from the mother? Is the father who requires you to tear away the mother from the child actually evil?

Anyone who chooses to opt out of this moral struggle is filtered out from the kingdom to come. Faith must be stretched and tested to its limit.

The puer aeternus coming to realize that he cannot serve two masters?