What does it mean to "Believe"?
I love this book. It's going to be in my top books of 2025 and one of my all time favorites. I wish everyone would read it,
We read this as part of my reading group and it was loved by both believers and non-believers alike. As someone who is a recovering atheist, I found it to be a wildly unique and pragmatic approach towards the Bible.
What is this book about, to me?
Jordan Peterson uses the Bible as a way to show how someone can align themselves with their highest potential, achieve the highest possible good, and avoid many of life's not-so-obvious pitfalls along the way.
It's part self help, part nuance bible stud. What makes it fascinating is that Peterson completely ignores all-man made aspects of religion (like the church), and makes zero claims about the supernatural, and does not identify as Christian himself.
The Nature of Sacrifice & Responsibility
In the book Peterson makes the claim that the word sacrifice and the word work mean exactly the same thing. Both require doing something you don't want to do now so that the future will be better. He then claims that God is the representation of the highest possible good. Though God as the character appears in many forms.
This is in reference to Cain and Abel, where Abel makes an accepted sacrifice to God and Cain does not. Suggesting that if I want to make God happy I must make a worthy sacrifice, or, if I want to reach the highest possible good I must make the best possible sacrifice.
I started to ask myself questions like: what work do I need to do that will generate the highest good? What should I sacrifice to reach my goals and am I sacrificing enough of myself now? (probably not!). Lastly, if I have great talents, then I bear great responsibility to use them.
Finally, this quote really reminded me of my time in Maui. Though it was a beautiful paradise I found myself without enough challenge, I don't want to live in paradise in my prime problem solving years.
"Apparently, the proper relationship with god is not easily established while we are comfortably ensconced in the lap of luxury” - Jordan Peterson
The world will not reward me for giving a half assed attempt at life.
We live on story
This book led to a major intellectual breakthrough for me.
I always thought religion required belief in some supernatural external force. The problem is that I'm not much a believer by nature-I like science, facts, and logic to dictate my worldview. I've always been skeptical of anything that doesn't fit within these bounds. It's also been frustrating that "believing in God" seems to mean something different to every person who calls themselves a believer. How can these people have truth if they can't even agree on what truth they believe in?
This book makes a much more pragmatic claim. Our actions are guided by the stories we tell ourselves-whether religious, philosophical, historical, or personal. That insight clicked for me because it aligns with something I’ve kept learning over the past decade of reading. We act out the stories we tell ourselves. We don't run on logic. Belief isn't just about intellectual agreement-it's about lived action.
What is the difference between asking, do I believe in God? and asking am I living in the pursuit of the highest possible good? If I act within the teachings of the bible (a story) but I don't think of myself a believer, what exactly does it mean to "believe" if the story I'm acting out is the same? When does this just become the semantics about labels?
Interestingly, this is a recurring insight found in many of my favorite books from across all genres:
- Philosophy & literature - Anna Karenina, Infinite Jest.
- Economics - Thinking Fast and Slow, Fooled by Randomness
- History - Sapiens
I don't exactly know what to do with this information yet, but it fits profoundly well with one of the other most important things I've ever learned: that we are the easiest person to lie to.
"The worst snake of all, is the one that dwells within. We are never betrayed more seriously then when we betray ourselves” - Jordan Peterson
“The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.” - Neitszche
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point ]that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others” - Dostoyevsky
Could it be the we are living out our entire lives based on stories told to us by family, friends, culture, but are riddled with lies that we believe and then act out?
Stories about investing
When I started raising money for real estate deals I learned something extremely quickly: "People don't invest in deals, they invest in people", but the reality is more like "People don't invest in deals, they invest in stories".
I've done great deals with partners and given people back great returns. I'm trustworthy, I work hard, and I'm very transparent. At the same time many of my peers in the space have more experience and more established infrastructures. There also operators who are much worse at this than I am and less trustworthy. So how does each investor decide where to place their capital? Story. Who they know, like, and trust. Sometimes these stories come true, other times investors find they have lied to themselves, or maybe the operator lied to themselves about how good they are.
Tesla trades at a higher market cap than all other car companies combined is because people have told themselves the story that Tesla will out-earn it's price sometime in the future, it's certainly overpriced for what it is today. Whether or not this is true or not is each persons story and opinion.
What is Bitcoin worth? What is the dollar worth? Both just stories that large groups of people have agreed are valuable...for now....and both are subject to self deception.
I used to be fundamentalist atheist
This lasted into my mid 30's. I didn't know I was a fundamentalist at the time I thought I was being reasonable. Religion seemed silly to me because the earth wasn't created in 7 days, snakes don't talk, what I knew of God was that he was very jealous and prone to constant destruction of his people and civilizations, and the religious people I met rarely seemed to have any insight for me, they just wanted me to know if I was on their team or not. This lead me to rejection. My problem, in hindsight, was that I was looking at fundamentalist or incomplete versions of the religious story and saying "that's bullshit", and it was bullshit, but it wasn't the full story.
This is the problem with stories. In finance, politics, religion, or the stories we tell about ourselves (I also told myself I wasn't creative for 35 years). We get a part of or incorrect bit of a story and fill in the gaps with our instincts and then call it rational (This is the premise of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which won a Nobel prize in behavioral economics). The fact is I had never read the bible, and I damn sure hadn't studied it, but I had a very convincing reason why it was all bullshit.
I do not call myself a believer today, but I certainly no longer call myself an atheist. Between Infinite Jest and Jordan Peterson I now understand deeply that everyone worships something - and choosing what to worship is perhaps life's greatest challenge.
One label I am willing to accept is that of student. I find that learning is the story that is the least likely to create self harm, and learning is the more interesting than knowing anyway.
The world is starting to make sense in a new way
After a decade of searching for universal human wisdom I feel like things are starting to make sense in a new way, something difficult to explain. I'm starting to understand humanity in a broader sense and see individuals with much more context. There are themes of people and societies that repeat on long time tables, usually longer than a single human life so we never notice them. Books allow the reader to experience multiple lifetimes and be transported into the past. This crunches down time and gives perspective beyond what a person can experience by themselves, it lets the reader understand the nature and cycle of humanity beyond what a single person can experience for themselves. Humans repeat the same set of stories over and over again.
If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend you do so. It will not convince you of a religious bent either way, nor would I ever try to do such a thing. It's just really useful human wisdom.
This book and others like it are difficult, so if you want to read books like this but have a hard doing so alone, our reading group exists for specifically this reason. All are welcome to join.