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Comment by Toenex | Hacker News Reader

> The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.

What an interesting point.

If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-O...

Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.'

Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.

Fully aware of that and I fully agree. I am not putting him up as some sort of cult figure - he definitely has an agenda, and pushes it masterfully.

That said it is probably the best argued agenda I have ever heard. As a full-blown atheist I had never heard such a good defence - explanation, really - of religion, and it's no exaggeration to say the fellow has radically changed my thinking on the matter.

I think it is OK to not agree with someone one hundred percent but still urge any intelligent person to listen to what they have to say, if it has merit.

He's also a transphobic asshole who thinks the existence of "transgender ideology" is a crime against humanity comparable to Stalinism.

I don't know about the "crime against humanity" but it's pretty hard to disagree with him on that topic. Most opponents fall back to crude insults, as you have. I suspect that a majority of reasonable people would agree that new genders do not spring into existence simply because you imagine them, and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female. Labelling this simple acknowledgement of reality "transphobia" is very dishonest.

>and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female

Hello? Intersex people? This is patently false under even the simplest analysis.

Makes me wonder how much we miss out on in the rest of the world because of the language barrier.

Order and chaos are just abstractions. They moment you get down to root cause analysis- There is generally some definition of good and evil you have to settle to understand why things like order and chaos exist.

If you are interested in a series of fantasy novels with a similar order/chaos mythology, I recommend the Saga of Recluce.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saga_of_Recluce

incredibly common theme in many pre-Christian myth systems. the good/evil dualism in Christianity is the real aberration, despite its prominence.

one of the more credible hypotheses I've encountered about this phenomenon is that early Christianity adopted many of the positions of Gnostic Manichaeism [0] in order to absorb rival cults.

0- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism

Norbert Wiener (of cybernetics fame) made a distinction between Manichaean devils and Augustinian devils-- essentially between evil as a force opposed to good vs evil as merely a lack of goodness.

Essentially the distinction is between mischief and error.

Edit: see e.g. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/12/najafi2.php

Christianity is far from alone in its belief in good and evil. The idea that there's a battle between good and evil goes back to Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, also have conceptions of good and evil, though they might not be viewed as being involved in a battle.

From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil.

Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.

A funny consequence is that Order vs. Chaos is almost entirely dependent on the scale you consider.

Perhaps it's the psychological effect that's salient--the honor/shame spectrum, rather than the good-explanation/bad-explanation spectrum.

While there is some overlap of Good/Evil and Order/Chaos it's pretty easy to show how "Order" can be "Evil".

Totalitarian regimes have that name because they demand total control and react strongly to any disorder. They are generally regarded as towards the "Evil" end of the Good/Evil spectrum.

In reality the OP is right - they are different things.

One does not have to assume that order is good, and chaos is evil.

Within a universe of absolute order, there can be no change, and no life can emerge. Within a universe of absolute chaos, there can be no structure, and no life can emerge. Neither is good, or evil, since those are human cultural constructs, and not fundamental physical laws or universal constants. Even life itself isn't necessarily good or evil, any more than a star or dust cloud is good or evil, it's just one of the many possible states that matter and energy can take as the universe inevitably exhausts itself.

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