“The spirit in us veers toward envy, like the front end of a car that needs to be aligned.”
The Devil in Disguise
“The devil is a moralist. The devil is self-righteous. The devil is an angel of light. The name Lucifer means light-bearer. Who could be against that? The devil is censorious. The devil disapproves of us and likes it when we disapprove of one another. The devil is a Pharisee. The devil is the accuser of the brethren, accusing them day and night before the throne (Rev. 12:10). And this means we should be far more concerned than we usually are about the danger of becoming like the devil. It is easier than it looks because it is far nobler than it sounds.”
One of the Great Miracles
“Remember the perfections of Jesus, and marvel at this crowning perfection—the fact that He was not totally exasperated all the time, in every conversation He ever had.”
What Makes Satan’s Factories Hum
“Preaching a propitiatory sacrifice is something that disrupts the way of the world. It unhinges how the world works. It gets in the way; it jams the signal. It cuts of the power that makes all the machinery in Satan’s factories hum so nicely.”
Going On All the Time
“This is the kind of thing have when you have two men, the best of friends, calling in love with the same girl. It happens when you have twin brothers wanting the favor or blessing of their father or the rule of the city. It happens when one church is enormously blessed where the other church across town ‘should have been.’”
The Way of the Old World
“Mimetic rivalry and conflict have taken root in that society as the ultimate contagion, and the hostility ratchets steadily upward. The ‘old way’ of dealing with this was to allow the crowd to spontaneously choose a victim, in whose guilt they had to absolutely believe. They killed or exile this person in a spasm of righteousness, and the cathartic effect takes effect. Peace is restored. It is fitting that one man die for the sake of the people, as one operator of this system once put it.”
VIrgins and Volcanoes
“We are living two millennia after Jesus died. Victimage still goes on, certainly, but not the robust way it did back when respectable people could still throw virgins into volcanoes” ().
And It Does Too
“One time many years ago, I went to a football game with my father. We entered the dome, where all the fans were whooping and hollering and carrying on, and my dad looked around—with a true instinct for this kind of thing—and said, ‘Well, it beats a public hanging.’”
Grabbing for the Same Thing
“Two toddlers in one room wanting the same shiny toy come into conflict. There is no conflict between either of those two toddlers and a dog across town, the one playing with a stick. Two similar individuals want the same thing. One of them gets there first, and the fact that he clearly wants that object makes the silver medalist want it even more. The winner sees that the runner-up wants it, and this makes him cling to his prize all the more. A mimetic loop, a mimetic escalation, occurs. Conflict is the inevitable result.”
Without Admitting It
“If we reject the substitution of Jesus, then we will continue in the ways of killing in order that we might hide from ourselves the fact that we are killing all the time.”