Jordan B. Peterson

And maybe that's some balance between justice and mercy.

And that's the balance between the hands of God.

There's a metaphor, that's a metaphorical in some way, the use of love and the use of mercy and justice, but then there's a stark reality underneath that too, is that, well, if you want to have great relationships with other people, that's not a bad starting place, and so you're likely going to thrive if that's actually the way you conduct yourself, and that thriving is real, and the universe of interactions you have with other people is real, and then you might say, well, if you extended that love to

beyond the human to the degree that you are capable of that, and you see echoes of that in these stories where even the cattle are allowed to rest on the Sabbath.

You want to extend that personality of care even beyond the human, and that seems like a laudable thing to do, and there's nothing about that that isn't adaptation to the structure of reality itself.

I mean, I think the idea that...

this isn't a personal relationship is only strange to us because we accept axiomatically the idea that the world is an object.

Here's another reason why it's not obvious.

When you look at objects, we thought forever that you see the object and you add something normative or value-laden to it, but all of the most modern cognitive neuroscience of perception shows that that's just wrong.

You see the value.

In fact, you might even see the value, the meaning, before you see the object.

It might be a prerequisite of object perception itself.

And so then that really begs the question, is what makes you so sure that the value isn't baked into the structure of reality itself?

It could easily be.

And it seems it depends on how you define reality.

But if reality is that which you adapt to, and you adapt to reality by adopting a value-laden schema, which you seem to have to do even to perceive, the only question then becomes, what's the proper value-laden schema?

And the biblical answer to that is something like a personal relationship with something like the highest personality.

So you could think of that as metaphorical, but it's also...

It's also real.

It's like, there isn't anything more real than that.