What is your sacred space?

JBP/Stephen Crowder Bitchute link**

JBP/Stephen Crowder YouTube link

(Length of dialogue: approx 1 hour)

I haven’t been listening to “political things” in a while. I find the oppositional stances people take to each other on issues unhelpful when repeated constantly. Dialectical conversation can be useful, but that rarely is what actually happens: it’s just one side trying to humiliate the other. The real world is very complicated and none of us perceive it in its entirety; I don’t know why this is such a hard thing to admit.

What I particularly appreciated in this dialogue was JBP’s comment on how people are not recognizing the need for the spiritual and religious in their daily lives. He argues that it is a universal human need, not a choice. Lacking a deliberate, conscious religious practice, religion comes back through unconscious patterns. 

My friend Joe responded and added to my observations with this insightful comment I want to share and keep for my own reference:

“I agree with you and JBP about people not recognizing the need for the religious and sacred in their lives. I would go further and say people are not recognizing the religious and sacred in their lives. We still have the religious and the sacred, we have substituted things like politics and various other ideologies for what was once the domain of a more singular idea of the religious and the sacred.

“I think we have forgotten that it was our shared story - the thing that bound us together as a community - that was the main value proposition of religion. It represented the shared story that served as the social glue to define the membrane of community. Because of the current lack of a shared story, we tend to treat people who have a different map of the world as if they are less than, or unworthy.

“A media engine that feeds on attention and is willing to take on that role religion once had - of crafting the narrative of what's true and not - what's sacred and not - what's good or evil - is breath cancer. It destroys the necessary integrity we need to function at our best by straining on our focus that we are best served when we understand that community is ultimately what we need to live in and depend on to carry us forward through time.

“I could be missing something (s).”

**As a side note, it’s interesting to compare the sort of comments on the Bitchute video versus YouTube. The commenters on Bitchute sound a lot more…..angry and alienated?  I am aware that there are people out there who might think less of me for listening to Dr. Peterson (whom I know a lot about) and Mr Crowder (whom I know much less about, but he says nothing here that I find particularly startling). To my ear though, the dialogue between the two of them is inviting and reasonable. The Bitchute commenters disagree: they see the dialogue as stupid and irrelevant at best, and proof of some truth-suppressing conspiracy at worst. They have dismissed both men because they do not support the views that the commenters endorse.

The Bitchute commentary is not something I would participate in. But I found it interesting to read, once I figured out what I was reading. There are groups of people who have formed their conclusions and simply stopped paying attention to what others are saying. Of course it is impossible to pay attention to everything and everyone, but I think it’s worth some thought that when people are shut out of conversations or leave them, they are still around, somewhere. You can’t wish or censor people out of existence.