Is Joe Rogan on the verge of converting to Christianity?
thanks to Clip from Logan’s Podcast People are wondering about a recent post on X by theologian Paul Anleitner. Among them was Jordan Peterson, who reposted the clip with the comment, “See you @joerogan.”
Peterson is a well-known Christian worshiper, but unlike his wife Tammy, he has never fully managed his actual religious beliefs. But perhaps he will point Logan in the right direction. God works in mysterious ways.
He was a connoisseur of 1970s femininity who could speak at length about the eerie beauty and spiritual depth of his murdered Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, and whose unique character, anywhere in the world, I could often feel its presence.
I’m tired of Peterson’s shy, Jungian approach to God, and prefer his professional conservative influence to the humble psychology professor he started out as. But I can’t deny that a few years ago, a man in a Batman villain suit played a decisive role in changing the course of my inner life.
Ghost of Dorothy Stratten
In 1993, I moved to an industrial city north of Prague, about 30 miles from the Czech-German border. Usti nad Labem has been around for nearly a thousand years, but after half a century of socialist dictatorship, everything old has been replaced by ugly prefabricated housing complexes and polluting chemical factories. There was an old church built in the 14th century, but I never went inside. It’s just a relic of a time when being stupid and superstitious was the only option.
I had a job teaching English to engineers at a local natural gas distribution company. I graduated from an Ivy League liberal arts school at age 22. Of course, I had no experience or knowledge worth sharing, but the students were older, had careers and families, but they treated me with respect and kindness and hospitality anyway. That’s how he treated me. Instead, I sympathized with them, feeling hopelessly trapped in their own little lives. I was going to do something bigger. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew it would be announced eventually.
I became friends with the town’s small foreign community of about 10 Americans and a few British and Canadians, but I kept my distance. They weren’t the friends I thought I was. It was too provincial and unsophisticated.
One that was particularly strange to me was a large, gentle giant named Chad from Los Angeles. Nearing the age of 30, he was living off the savings he had accumulated from a series of showbiz-related jobs, including running a porn video distribution company and managing an old Beverly Hills mansion now used for filming. . This mansion was the scene of a creepy murder-suicide that occurred in high society in the 1920s, and is haunted by ghosts. He told of a strange encounter he had there late at night, alone, and the sound of a piano heard in the distance, which suddenly stopped as he headed towards it. A heavy, nauseating sense of malice that comes over him in certain rooms. An eerie feeling of being pushed away.
These stories caught our attention, but they didn’t seem to be a big deal to him. He said he has always been particularly sensitive to the supernatural and has endless anecdotes to back that up. Within seconds of meeting her at a party, he shared an overwhelming mutual attraction with the girl, only to find out that they lived together in pre-revolutionary France until he was hanged for trying to rescue her from a prostitute. I realized that they were lovers. A vivid exploration of the lost city of Atlantis in a lucid dream and the painful sense of exile it left him with. He was a connoisseur of 1970s femininity who could speak at length about the eerie beauty and spiritual depth of his murdered Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten, and whose unique character, anywhere in the world, I could often feel its presence.
I found all of this to be unforgivably ridiculous. And I felt that it was having a negative impact on me and my future. But I had to admit he was funny and intelligent. We became friends, even though I secretly regarded him with cold, sarcastic amusement. I enjoyed the factual and unpretentious way he conveyed even his boldest claims. Once, when I was feeling hungover and anxious, I asked him if he wasn’t afraid of nuclear war. He sighs with mild exasperation and explains that it is clear that the higher beings protecting the Earth will never allow this.
This thought didn’t reassure me, but his relaxed, confident demeanor did. And I started to realize that maybe thinking of crystals as nonsense doesn’t make me a better person. Even if Chad wasn’t the conduit to the spirit world he claimed to be, he was unusually empathetic and insightful when it came to others, which is why we all liked being around him. The reason is. Meanwhile, I remained in a state of excited self-obsession as my sense of who I was and what that meant was ever-changing.
surrounded by martyrs
I was too educated to believe that evil could leave any kind of spiritual imprint on the place, but only 50 years ago I had been using it as a backdrop for my inner drama. The city was ceded to Hitler. After that, it was bombed by the American military. Immediately after the war, this place became the scene of a brutal massacre. There, a Czech mob attacked their German neighbors, shot and killed about 100 men, women, and children, and threw them off the town’s bridge. Chad may have been a weirdo, but he at least made me think that maybe there was something at stake in this world. That what we did and even what we thought mattered. That transcendent good and evil actually exist and have the potential to move us.
When Chad returned to California and I moved to Prague, these abstract musings lost their appeal. We finally arrived at the scene of the action. Here, the visionaries were not serious enough to talk about communicating with the dead and the melancholy of old souls lost in the mists of time. They were there to evoke a coming techno-utopia, but that required optimism and a willingness to let go of the past. I was also a participant, but I was also undisciplined and easily discouraged. Everywhere I looked there were monuments to martyrs. A heretic priest was burned at the stake, a civilian was killed in a fateful uprising against the Nazis, and a young medical student self-immolated in protest of the Soviet occupation. Their determination, like my desperate efforts, seemed meaningless in the face of oblivion.
The obvious cure for this dissolute existential dread was to move to New York City and think seriously about my life. I gave in to temptation, lived in a small apartment in a cool neighborhood, and took a low-paying but status-signifying media job. I met an old college girlfriend who had a decent career and many of the same friends I had. We got married, had a child, and moved to Los Angeles, her hometown, which Chad had heard so much about.
But he and his wife and son had settled in a small town outside of Sacramento, working a mediocre job. He wouldn’t have fit into my life anyway. We were upwardly mobile, cultured, and had high expectations for ourselves and our children. Needless to say, we were good and generous people. From time to time, the church served as a modest reminder of gratitude and giving back. We didn’t make any commitments that would make us uncomfortable with our friends or put us at odds with our community.
Bingin Ram Dass
Although I was comfortably settled, I still imagined that I was about to make a change and achieve clear success. I didn’t until one day. I wasn’t special, kids would abandon me quickly, and I was going to die. I tried to soothe my panic with YouTube therapy, running, and Ram Dass videos.
Nothing worked for me until I came across an old lecture by Jordan Peterson. At the time, he was on the rise and infamous for his Toronto transgender turmoil, but he had yet to become a full-fledged sensation. In some ways, his confidence in what we can know about his life reminded me of Chad. I especially liked his gnomic yet strictly intellectual treatment of Christianity. It suggested a way in which we could derive solace from a meaningfully ordered universe without actually doing something as simple as worship. Perhaps my condition would improve if I simply “acted” as if God really existed.
Then the goth girl I hung out with in high school resurfaced on Facebook as a devout Catholic housewife and pro-life activist. She had a few pointless arguments and then I calmed down and started reading everything she posted without comments. It was very interesting to imagine myself being so gullible and narrow-minded. I watched the videos she linked and read the books she mentioned. I found myself in this strange and backward culture. A few months later, I was reciting the rosary in my car for the first time to see what would happen.
I joined the church about a year later. Just before the coronavirus lockdown, we received a call that Chad had suffered a severe stroke. We haven’t been in touch for years. I donated money to his recovery fund and was added to a text message group of his friends and family who subconsciously offered prayers and invoked the healing power of God’s mercy. I was surprised at how natural it felt to do the same. And that actually praying felt like I was doing something useful. I still include him in my daily rosary. Maybe it’s just a feeling of guilt that he hasn’t written or called me lately, but I’d like to think that he’ll figure it out somehow. If so, I hope he humors me as I humored him 30 years ago. You never know where it will lead.
