Over the Christmas break, I spent a fair amount of time binge-watching Jordan Peterson videos. For those not in the know, Peterson is not the latest hip-hop sensation; he is a psychology professor from Toronto who has made a rather substantial splash as a culture commentator and public intellectual, largely through appearances on social media.
Of the many Peterson videos, the ones that intrigued me the most featured his dialogues with Sam Harris, one of the “four horsemen of the new atheism” and perhaps the most strident critic of religion on the scene today. The reason that Peterson was paired with Harris is that the former has begun to explore, in remarkably perceptive ways, the psychological and archetypal significance of the biblical stories and hence implicitly to question the wholesale dismissal of religion that one finds in the new atheists.
