I watched a video where a young man talked about his conversion experience, going from a broken, depressed atheist to a vibrant follower of Christ—and how Jordan Peterson helped him along.

The essence of this conversion story is the transformation of emotional states. It begins with confusion, despair, and a lack of understanding, which are all replaced by their opposites: clarity, faith, joy, and understanding—all through the adoption of a new belief.

This belief is ostensibly in an external power; Christ, who is understood as synonymous with God—the ultimate power and essence underlying all reality.

On the surface, their claims seem humble, even endearing. They present themselves as entirely helpless without Christ, and it is Christ who lifted them out of distress.

But to me (and excuse my harsh language), it is the apogee of insane, shameless arrogance—not that there’s anything wrong with that!

This is especially evident in the story told by Peterson’s wife, where she genuinely believes that the Creator of Everything intervened in the nature of reality, adjusting it to suit her desire to live for a few more years by mysteriously aiding her medical procedure.

If she had explicitly said, “I am so important that the entire universe should be bent and broken in whatever shape necessary for me to feel better for a few years,” she would be a laughingstock, an overgrown toddler.

But because it’s being laundered through an external authority figure, it’s seen as humility—“the boss wanted it to happen, I love whatever the boss does.”

The real story with the converted atheist is that he didn’t have much of a backbone and was getting crushed by life. This is a natural feeling, given the fact that the domestication of the human animal is constantly accelerating, and in practice, that just means people’s wills are being systematically broken in more sophisticated ways. After all, it’s what cities are designed to do, since they require so many highly obedient workers.

Those who are more sensitive are going to feel as if their souls are being slowly strangled to death. In order to overcome this sense of slow and painful suffocation, discursive rational thought is too feeble. There must be some experience of absolute internal worth, something like:

“I am extremely special and important; everything I do matters forever.”

That young man, who’s just some average guy, can’t come out and say this, so he hunts for the most acceptable way to render this feeling, which is prepackaged in religious systems; they promise that each moment of our lives is being chaperoned by the boss of the whole universe, and our decisions are all part of a grand metaphysical theater where we have a starring role.

I think the reason Peterson is so fascinated with the story of Abraham is that it’s an artistic stylization of a historical reality that reminds him of himself—ditto for the young man who converted.

When the Israelites were getting crushed by the Assyrians, at a certain point they decided that enough was enough, and their will was baptized as the most important thing in the universe. Bully someone enough, and you’ll make an even bigger bully.

They consolidated their messy pantheon and decided that there was just one figure in charge, and that authority was on their side—whatever they did was His Perfect Law. Anything bad that happened was just punishment, a lesson for them to get better.

God disciplines those He loves; He has chosen the Israelites for His special mission, above all other people. Yes, they will occasionally have to split open the skulls of babies from the enemy tribe, but God’s orders are to show no mercy to their enemies, and who are they to disobey God?

The practical effects of this boundless arrogance and merciless vengeance are clear enough; billions of people have treated their hodgepodge of stories, songs, and legal codes as the most holy words ever written.

The final triumph is that they are often credited with inventing morality itself—there can be no lie that is bolder, bigger, more arrogant, and more shameless; the purity of a blood-soaked lion.

Christ is the cherry on top because He exalts the hypocrisy to its final level; the ugliest, most vengeful hatred where one’s enemies are tortured for all eternity with a clean conscience—masked with the sugary promise of infinite harmonious love for mankind. The enemies don’t even need to be physically wiped out or enslaved (though they may be), as the boss will take care of that, too.

The unfortunate side effect of this conversion experience is that there is a tendency to shadowbox with past beliefs.

For the young man, and for Peterson, ‘atheism’ represents not just a vast collection of different perspectives but a pit of despair—and they will not feel at rest until they’ve eradicated despair, or in other words: until they’ve converted the whole world. Every knee shall bow.

Antagonism from the ‘atheists’ is an alluring invitation to exercise this newfound will—now blessed by a Holy Spirit—to unleash every single ounce of rancor from their body, to redeem themselves from the suffocation that had hurt them for so long.

The level of cruelty I’ve received from adherents of the Religion of Love has been nothing short of extreme (in my hysterical opinion), and it’s because they’re not actually attacking me—I only exist as a cipher of their torment and doubt.

They see ‘rationality’, ‘intellect’, and other adjacent ideas as reminders of personal agony, a pain resolved only through an emotional connection to the raw self; desire, hatred, lust, greed—albeit channeled through the mask of a socially approved authority.

Conversions to atheism tend to be so uninspiring and uncool because the socially approved authority that they use to mask their egoism includes scientific disciplines like biology and astronomy, which are indeed great jewels of humanity, but they’re sedate and ascetic—products of the city’s domestication. Atheists are pathetic because of their submissive adherence to ‘progressive’ moral fashions.

The fearsome Old-Testament-style atheism, where enemies are ruthlessly killed in the name of Justice, is highly discouraged; Peterson has railed against it as the greatest horror in history.

But its Old Testament structure explains why so many young men are attracted to Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and other charismatic villains; these figures saw themselves as chosen by The Universe, and everything they did was blessed—the death and privation of millions meant nothing; their personal lives and legacy meant everything. Although, in a technical sense, they were more merciful because they believed that the punishment of their enemies ended at death.

At the heart of it, the young man’s conversion, Jordan’s struggle, the Old Testament’s brutal self-justifications, and even the atheist’s scientistic pieties all emerge from the same root: the unbearable need to matter.

By laundering this need through grand narratives, private hunger turns into universal law, personal salvation into cosmic warfare. The truth is claimed to be found, when really, the discovery is of a more acceptable way to say: I matter.

And what a joyful deception—the masks of Truth, God, and Reason parry and dance as our longings flare into something vast, something absurd, something divine.