Peter Thiel: belief

Transcript context

…The Hebrew Bible, to me, has more of this dialectic that we found in a lot of the other topics. Mix of optimism and pessimism. Much more irony, multiple voices, varying perspectives. My answer would be Hebrew Bible has influenced me much more than the New Testament, which has hardly influenced me at all. You are different in that way, but what is it in your character, intellect, or background, do you think accounts for that difference, given some of the other things you’ve said? I would disagree with that characterization of it. I think Christ is a very complex, very ambiguous figure in many ways, which makes the interpretation quite difficult. I think almost everything that Christ said could be described as an answer to something that’s true, that most people did not agree on. And I think for the most part, it was necessary for Christ to be very careful how he expressed himself. It was mostly in these extremely parabolic, indirect modalities, because if it had been too direct, it would have been very dangerous. It was John Locke, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, said that Christ obviously had to mislead people, since if he had not done so, the authorities might have tried to kill him. There’s a kind of Straussian Christ here?…

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