Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Another French intellectual who argues that the tradition out of which Jesus came was liberating, and that Jesus's death on the cross is a moment of importance to all humans is Rene Girard, whose book "On Things Hidden Since the Beginning of Time" is quite impressive. |
I'm glad you mentioned René Girard, his ideas fascinate me and I think there is a lot of truth in them, though I don't subscribe to them completely.
Just want to point out that Girard's point is that the teachings of Jesus were completely misunderstood from the beginning. I think it's better to read "Violence and the Sacred" before reading "Things hidden since the beginning of time".
His theory is that the role of religion has always been to break the vicious circle of violence (you do me a wrong, I retaliate, you or your relatives retaliate, and so on in an increasing spiral of violence) by diverting the flow of violence to a scapegoat. The cathartic explosion does calm the violence for some time, which confirms that the scapegoat was indeed responsible for it all (or, alternatively, voluntarily sacrificed themselves to make things right).
This is the whole demonstration in Violence and the Sacred. Then in the second book, he proceeds to analyze how this process slowly started to lose if efficiency as the people were more and more aware of it. There are many signs of this in the Old Testament, such as Abraham's story, or Cain and Abel (Cain is supposed to be the bad one, but after all, God had singled him out before he did anything wrong, and on the other hand why doesn't God just smite him instead of only exiling him while at the same time putting a protection on him?)
But the culmination is the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus, which is that the only way to stop the violence is to... just stop it. If someone strikes you, you don't strike them back. The spiral stops here. Of course you may also end up dead, which is what Jesus did.
But this teaching started to be lost almost immediately after the death of Jesus. Within less than a century, the old narrative came back to absorb the death of Jesus in the old myth: he died for our sins, to make things right again. And since then things have been getting worse and worse, the sacrifices get less and less effective in putting an end to violence, and as a result the search for victims becomes more and more desperate and violent.
I hope I didn't mangle his theories too much. I don't know how they sound as I relate them, but it's really worth reading the books IMO. There are many, many things in his demonstration that strike me as true, although I can't really subscribe to it as an all-encompassing explanation to everything in the history of humanity. But it's certainly food for thought.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
Another book which argues that religions aren't just arbitrary collections of rules, but that they express something deeper, is Chris Knight's "Blood Relations." Knight finds critical knowledge in the myths of the people of Central Australia, the Arrernte. |
Thank you, I'll look it up!