Sublime

While mythical religions are based on texts that are told from the perspective of persecutors, the biblical writings show solidarity with the victims of sacrificial persecution.

matter—there is nothing that a living creature is more strongly attached to than its own benefit. So whatever seems to him to be standing in the way of that benefit, be it a brother, or father, or child, or lover, or beloved, he will proceed to hate, reject, and curse. [16] For there is nothing that he loves so much by nature as his own benefit; fo

The scapegoat mechanism prevented a society in crisis from destroying itself from within. It worked in a paradoxical way: the scapegoat mechanism contained violence through violence.

This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.

Girard calls the transferring of blame onto the victim and then the transferring of credit for the new peace and prosperity “double transference.” Now if the victim could cause all their troubles and yet also produce such peace and prosperity, he or she must be a different sort of being, a higher, more powerful sort. This is the birth of the gods.

“The principal source of violence between human beings is mimetic rivalry, the rivalry resulting from imitation of a model who becomes a rival or of a rival who becomes a model”