French - Historian | December 25, 1923 - November 4, 2015
The protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they reveal Jesus' innocence and, little by little, that of all analogous victims.
Rene Girard
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Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process.
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The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures.
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A mimetic crisis is when people become undifferentiated. There are no more social classes, there are no more social differences, and so forth.
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I believe that in intense conflict, far from becoming sharper, differences melt away.
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It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.
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We don't even know what our desire is. We ask other people to tell us our desires. We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths - but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.
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Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats.
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I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this - or else face utter despair.
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Every time I could escape from Sunday church, I did, from the age of twelve until about thirty.
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I do not read many periodicals, and I have little or no contact with progressive Christians, so I don't really know what goes on with them. It seemed to me that very often, the progressive Christianity was an initial step in de-Christianization, but this was probably unfair.
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I think the most influential aspect of my work is to show that Judaism and Christianity exist in a continuity with archaic religions.
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