Murderous Myth or Gospel Unveiled

“The spirit born of the sacrificial murder inspires the community of its perpetrators to remember the murder as holy and creative. The Spirit of the Gospels, on the other hand, remembers the false accusations, sordid plots, the sham trials, and the weak faith of those who fled” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 130).

The Gospel Bars the Old Way Out

“Wherever and whenever the biblical tradition morally incapacitates a culture’s sacrificial system, the aggravating effects of mimetic desire flourish precisely because there is no reliable way to focus them on one flamboyant object of lust or loathing and eliminate them at his or her expense” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 110).

Instead of “A Life for an Eye, a Life for a Tooth”

“As a matter of fact, the imitation involved in revenge tends toward more violence, for it tends to repay the violence it avenges ‘with interest.’ It tends to escalate the violence. The ancient injunction, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ was an attempt to keep revenge from spinning out of control” …

Rallying Points

“Whether it is a public hanging, a war, or a televised glorification of violence, a culture’s righteous violence will fascinate its onlookers. It will be a spectacle. Regardless of the rhetoric and details of its justification, if a society can heighten that fascination and bring it to a cathartic sacrificial conclusion, then the sacrificial violence …

Hostility As Distraction

“One is that the ‘us versus them’ motif can be manipulated to revive a group’s esprit de corps and to ‘divert attention from internal problems.’ That is to say, communal violence is an antidote for internal strife and the ‘civil’ or domestic violence to which it might otherwise lead. Campaigns against outsiders or evildoers revive …

Staying Power

“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 …