I loved this video and felt the urge to join the group just so I could talk about it!
Stefan is objectively Christian, no doubt. If he were introduced to the interpretation of the Biblical scriptures of French philosopher René Girard I believe he would agree wholeheartedly.
The main difference in Girard's approach to Christianity and "evangelical" Christianity is in the understanding of the atonement. Evangelicals believe in penal substitution, that is, God demands the death of his son to pay for the sins of humanity- an absurd notion taken at face value.
Girard's approach begins with his theory of how society is structured, the Mimetic Theory. The theory states that people are mimetic. Everything they learn is through imitation. A child imitates his parents. Children imitate other children, and so on. Conflicts arise when desires converge on the same object. Two children playing will fight over the same toy. You can give the one of the children an identical toy and it will not solve the fight. This is because it is not actually the thing itself that is being fought over but the idea of the thing. As we get older our desires become more abstract; prestige, power, money, etc.
What keeps society ordered and not falling into the war of all against all, as Hobbes put it, is the scapegoat mechanism. As conflicts arise and become more numerous at some point the people unite against a single victim. This single victim is then seen as the cause of all the problems in the community. This victim is then killed or driven out. Suddenly, there is peace in the community again. This victim that was a moment before the cause of all of the community's problems now becomes a god. This is the god of the ancient world and the god of our modern world to a significant faction still. How is peace maintained? Through violence, of course.
Girard would say Jesus had to die, not to appease his father, but to lay bare the scapegoat mechanism upon which culture was founded. Jesus asks, "How can Satan cast out Satan?" Since the death and resurrection of Jesus, this mechanism no longer brings peace to the community but only more and more violence because Jesus deprives us of the efficacy of sacrifice. The kingdom of Satan (peace through violence) is divided against itself and can not stand.
Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, etc. not for us to be masochists but to stop the escalation of violence. It is a rule of thumb for not letting the violence get out of hand. The Holy Spirit is very visible in today's world. We see it in our hyper-awareness of victims. We see it in the 'political correctness' of the day. We can say that we save more victims than we ever have in history and at the same time we also kill more victims than ever before. Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds is key. The Holy Spirit is growing at the same time the anti-Christ spirit is growing.
The problem with atheists in general (and Christians, for that matter) is that they believe religion is primarily about God the creator of everything. This is false. Archaic religion is about two things: prohibitions and sacrifice. We are living in a world now where sacrifice no longer brings us peace and prohibitions are becoming more and more obsolete. If the world does not follow the rules of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus laid out then humanity will indeed perish as he predicted. The judgement statements of Jesus were not him warning of God's violence, but the violence of man against man.
I'm very interested to hear what the group thinks about these ideas and if they have ever read anything by René Girard. I hope the thought of Girard can make it's way to Stefan because he seems to me already almost there.
