7 May

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of imitation in human life, and how it leads to violence, because it’s based on status rivalry. And that the violence is avoided or stopped by creating scapegoats, that then everybody piles-on against, re-unifying the crowd. Check this. Girard came to believe in God, but not through any pre-existing faith. He came to believe through his study of this imitative rivalry and scapegoating mechanism. He thought it impossible for humans to have been able to both identify and act against this mechanism alone, that it must have required divine intervention. I agree with him, humans are incapable of doing this. And that’s what he thought Christ was. That divine intervention, and he sacrificed himself, becoming the ultimate scapegoat, to make the mechanism visible to humans. That was the divine intervention. It led to centuries of social progress, led by Christian institutions, progress that didn’t exist prior to them. It’s very common as a ‘modern’ person to think Gods were just fairytales, for ignorant people in the past. Michel Serres once said we now happily accept miraculous things from science (which in the past only looked for laws), but now look only for boring causal laws in history. A complete inversion. We maybe just forgot that miracles can be real. We live in societies that happily deny we went to the moon, only decades previously. It’s not difficult to see how a possible divine intervention more than 2000 years ago is now dismissed as a childish fairytale.