Orthodox Jonathan Pageau, Catholic Marshall McLuhan SMASH Protestant Reformation!: Philosophy
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Part 2 of the newest Mindgasms Podcast with my Orthodox Christian friend named Shane Kennedy and his Protestant Christian friend named Justin to discuss an article on the website of the Orthodox artist and intellectual associated with Jordan Peterson named Jonathan Pageau, about the Canadian philosopher, Marshal McLuhan. It explores how, from McLuhan’s Catholic perspective, the Protestant Reformation supposedly ruined Christianity. I’m an agnostic atheist, and we discuss our different opinions on this. We get into McLuhan’s claim that the Protestant Reformation changed faith from more of a sense to more of a concept, along with his criticisms of rationalism, materialism and individualism that he associates with Protestantism. Also, we discuss McLuhan’s argument that the Reformation leading to more different interpretations of Christianity is bad, and limited people’s perspectives more than the formerly collective way of understanding it. We get into our agreements and disagreements of what Christianity is about to both Justin and Shane too, and define a wide variety of terms such as faith and god. Descartes’ philosophical foundationalism, Kant’s transcendental idea of God, both thinkers’ connection to and justification for individualism, rationalism, along with McLuhan’s claims that these are connected to Protestantism and that they lead to metaphysical nihilism, are explored as well. Also, we discuss my distinction between beliefs, knowledge and actions, which Shane disagrees with, along with his shared opinion with Justin that God’s existence does not need to be rationally proved. We talk about whether the bible qualifies as a form of technology, whether it’s a visual medium, and compare empiricism to Pragmatism. Another topic we get into is Aristotle’s philosophy being used to support Catholicism, and Plato being used to prop up Protestantism. We also examine whether the whole world can be seen as a church, what this means, how this can be reconciled with McLuhan’s claim that our culture is post-Christian, as well as whether the latter claim is true. We discuss how Mcluhan defines the logos and how Justin and Shane see this concept too, along with whether The Enlightenment can be causally connected to nihilism:
Check out episode 1 of this conversation, in which we talk about most of what is mentioned above, in addition to the problems with language in taking the bible literally, the issue of seeing Christianity as an ethical worldview, some philosophical perspectives like Wittgenstein’s two different theories of language, along with the similarities and differences between Christianity and other religions:
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