“What is distinctive about the contest between myth and gospel, therefore, is that myth is fragile and survives only when its premises are accepted uncritically, while the gospel can be trashed and betrayed and corrupted almost beyond recognition without fatally compromising its inherent demythologizing power. Time and again, the gospel has been turned into a …
The Blinders of Myth
“Fundamentally, human history is a struggle between myth and gospel . . . Myth — and the primitive religious cosmology it narrates — mutes the victim’s voice. It fills the eyes and nose with incense and the ears with incantations. When the myth is firmly in place, even those closest to the victims, the ones …
Sacred Violence No More
“On the contrary, by arousing empathy for victims, the biblical tradition has destroyed the kind of peace and social consensus that conventional cultures were once able to achieve at the victim’s expense. In clogging the gears of the scapegoating machinery, the gospel revelation brings not peace but a sword. This is purely and simply because …
Spears to Pruning Hooks
“On the contrary, what Scripture is intended to achieve is a conversion of the human heart that will allow humanity to dispense with organized violence without sliding into the abyss of uncontrollable violence, the apocalyptic abyss” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 15).
You Would Think It An Obvious Point
“Trying to avoid intolerance by presenting all possible points of view will be a boon to those suffering intolerance only if the various points of view presented express an equally robust empathy for the victims of intolerance” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 9).
And One Visitor Said, “I Can See the Broken Eggs. Where’s the Omelet?”
“Caiaphas was invoking a mechanism for preserving culture that is as old as culture itself. Whether it is the Assyro-Babylonian myth declaring that Marduk created the world by killing the monster Tiamat; or the Teutonic myth telling how Odin formed the world by raising the corpse of Ymir from the sea of Ymir’s own blood; …
Sacrifice As Inoculation
“The physician inoculates the patient with a minute amount of the disease, just as, in the course of the rites, the community is injected with a minute amount of violence, enabling it to ward off an attack of full-fledged violence” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 289).
The Heart of the Scandal
“The more frenzied the mimetic process becomes, caught up in the confusion of constantly changing forms, the more unwilling men are to recognize that they have made an obstacle of the model and a model of the obstacle” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 189).
Hidden In Plain Sight
“We have only to look at the numerous everyday displays of envy and jealousy to realize that even adults never attribute their mutual antagonisms to that simple phenomenon” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 176).
Tweedledum and Tweedledee Contend for the Throne
“From within the system, only differences are perceived; from without, the antagonists all seem alike. From inside, sameness is not visible; from outside, differences cannot be seen” (Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p.159).