Trying not to believe -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 19:30:07 03/31/08 Mon
Author: Betsy Peters
Subject: Trying not to believe

In The Scapegoat, p. 101, Girard writes that if we cease to believe in the scapegoat mechanism, it ceases to function. I was considering the operation of faith in stopping the scapegoat mechanism and was pondering just how difficult it is to cease believing in something. Faith operates on the evidence of past actions. A child will believe a parent's promise to take him out to dinner if that parent has proven trustworthy in the past. The reverse is also true, we do not believe things that do not prove trustworthy--like the Uncle who promised you every Christmas that he would give you $100,000,000. When we apply this to the mechanism of communal violence, again the past evidence bears strongly on the faith of the community. The community believes in the scapegoat mechanism to reconcile the tensions in the community because in years past, this has indeed appeared to solve the problem. The more this mechanism has apparently verified itself, the more the community will believe it-- the harder it will be to break the belief.

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Replies:

Perspective -- JPJ II, 19:20:59 04/06/08 Sun