Jordan Peterson explains how Bible stories can help navigate modern life even for atheists

Clinical psychologist, lecturer and author Dr.Jordan Peterson turns his insightful analysis to The Bible for his latest book.In “We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine,” out November 19th, he argues the stories within the holy book can help guide anyone through life, regardless of their religious viewpoint.

“If you can’t see the wisdom [in the Bible], you haven’t contemplated your own misery … That’s the thing you have to understand: The books are about you,” he told The Post’s Rikki Schlott in an exclusive interview.Here, he explains how young people can make order out of the chaos of modern life, with guidance from the religious text: This book is an impressive tome.How long did it take you to write it?That’s a hard thing to say.

I probably started working on it, in some ways, when I was 13.So how long is that — 50 years?Now, when did I put pen to paper? For this particular book, it was after the publication of the last one [in 2021], but I wrote three at the same time.A fair bit of it was the consequence of touring and lecturing, because I used the lectures to develop the ideas, and sometimes I recorded them and used the transcript as a template for a chapter.

It’s radically re-written because a lecture and a book are very different, but it took three years.You have a remarkable ability to get young people excited about things that might not be sexy to them at first glance, like making your bed.How do you get young people invigorated by a topic as serious as religion?We have a crisis of identity in our culture.

Obviously, the culture war is a crisis of identity.And, well, this is a book about identity.

It’s about the identity of the divine and its relationship with men and women and culture.The reason I say, make your bed is, well, you can probably do that.Maybe your life is chaos, just hellish, like Israelites in the desert, and you don’t know where to start.

Well, you can organize your sock drawer and make your b...