A Quote From Battling to The End

My Current Tangent is to UnPack The Quote Below

“The truth can gradually appear to people only through a veil of lies. The urgency of the christian message has become clear because of the disintegration of The Powers and Principalities, in other words through the collapse of the idea of empire. However, the empire tended to hold back the rise of violence: as we have seen, attackers want peace. They want to dominate, in other words pacify: pax romana, pax sovietica, pax americana…. The truth appears only once the falsehood has exhausted its last subterfuges.

       Christianity reveals the central role of religion in the genesis of culture. Christianity truly demystifies religion because it points out the error on which archaic religion is based: the effectiveness of the divinized scapegoat. The revelation deprives people of religion, and it is this deprivation that can be increasingly seen around us, in the illusion that we are finished with it. Those who believe in the defeat of religion are now seeing it reappear as the product of that very demystification, but what is being produced is something sullied and demonetized, and frightened by the revelation of which it was the object. It is the loss of sacrifice, the only system able to contain violence, which brings violence back among us. Today’s anti-religion combines so much error and nonsense about religion that it can barely be satirized. It serves the cause that it would undermine, and secretly defeats the mistakes that it believes it is correcting: it frightens religion without managing to control it. By seeking to demystify sacrifice, current demystification does a much worse job than the Christianity  that it thinks it is attacking because it still confuses Christianity with archaic religion.

             People today thus have to be immersed in untruth in order to have a little peace. This relationship between falsehood and peace is fundamental. The passion brings war because it tells the truth about humanity, and deprives it of any sacrificial mechanism. Normal(archaic) religion, which creates gods, is the one with scapegoats. As soon as The Passion teaches people that the victims are innocent, they fight. This is precisely what the scapegoat victims used to prevent them from doing. When sacrifice disappears all that remains is rivalry, and it escalates to extremes. In a way the Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb. The passion will explode the powers and principalities.” —- Rene Girard - “Battling to The End”

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