Tell the Young People about a New Kind of Religion

The function of religion, which, for Girardians, is to decrease the flames of our antagonism by sequencing the scapegoating mechanism, has turned into the dysfunction of the world.

The dysfunction of the world revolves around the fallacy of separateness; that certain people are in and certain people are out. In this way, in-group is always in the process of offloading their psycho-spiritual antagonism onto the backs of out-group. (Out-group is always getting larger if, for no other reason than in-group has decided to make the whole “broad is the road that leads to destruction” thing a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

Grace is constantly trying to get into in-group, and sometimes, it’s even successful. In such moments, in-group recognizes, “Oh, yeah, context matters, people matter, the world matters, love is in everything, and everything is in love.”

Other times, in-group resists, and any attempt to help in-group understand unconditional grace runs into a commensurate expansion in their definition of separation (i.e., sin, law, immorality, evil, holiness, on and on.) Thus, separation becomes a kind of idol-worshiping activity like mass and energy: always transformable but never really done away with.

What do you do with such a fire … with such a human-damaging concept that can never really be done away with? Well, you devise a religion to manage the fire as best you can … tamp it down enough that it doesn’t burn everything down, but fan it enough that it never goes out. This is what scapegoating does. Scapegoating is both remedy and poison. Remedy because it provides a way for the in people to process their antagonism, but poison because it’s a fake process … all it really does is keep the fire alive.

Tell the young people that what we need is a new kind of religion; a religion that doesn’t try and deal with its internal fire by devising doctrines of separateness, blame, and punishment. What would this new religion espouse? What would it propose? What kind of agent could actually deal with our internal fires and decode our scapegoating mechanism? Oh, I got it … love, fire-absorbing, agitation-processing love.

How could I explain such a love? I don’t know, how about comparing it to the kind of love a parent has for their kid? Yeah, this new kind of religion says that the divine relates to creation in the same frequency that a healthy parent relates to their child, which is to say … God has never. ever. been separate. from anyone. or anything.

The function of the new religion could be the hope of the world.

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