The good son imitates the father with such passion that father and son become each other's chief stumbling block - a situation the indifferent son mo… - René Girard

For the first time in human history the divine and collective violence are separated from one another. The Bible rejects the gods created by sacralized violence.

The powers and principalities want to be “revolutionary” now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. This other totalitarianism presents itself as the liberator of humanity. In trying to usurp the place of Christ, the powers imitate him in the way a mimetic rival imitates his model in order to defeat him. They denounce the Christian concern for victims as hypocritical and a pale imitation of the authentic crusade against oppression and persecution for which they would carry the banner

MT: These texts are at one and the same time very beautiful and obscure; they need to be explicated, clarified. “What is hidden will be revealed.” Why must Revelation be hidden? RG: It's not that it must be hidden, actually it's not hidden at all. It's mankind that is blind. We're inside the closure of representation, everyone is in the fishbowl of his or her culture. In other words, mankind doesn't see what I was saying earlier, the principle of illusion that governs our viewpoint. Even after the Revelation, we still don't understand. MT: Does that mean that things are going to emerge gradually, but that at first they're incomprehensible? RG: They seem incomprehensible because mankind lives under the sign of Satan, lives a lie and lives in fear of the lie, in fear of liars. The reversal performed by the Passion has yet to occur. MT: Insofar as the Church itself has been mistaken for two thousand years and has been practicing a sacrificial reading of the Passion of the Christ, that reading is a way of hiding Revelation. RG: I'm not saying that the Church is mistaken. The reading that I'm proposing is in line with all the great dogmas, but it endows them with an anthropological underpinning that had gone unnoticed. MT: Why not just clean up our bad habits by sweeping them away once and for all in the year zero, making way for an era of love and infinite peace? RG: Because the world wouldn't have been able to take it! Since the sacrificial principle is the fundamental principle of the human order — up to a certain point human beings need to pour out their violence and tensions onto scapegoats — destroying it all at once is impossible. That's why Christianity is made in such a way as to allow for transitions. This is no doubt one of the reasons why it is at once so far from and so close to myth, and always susceptible to being interpreted a bit mythically. When Nietzsche says that Christianity is impossible, that it can only lead to absurdities, to outrageous, insane t