@lukeburgis That's exquisite prose. It was Bailie on Girard who first got me to Hamerton-Kelly. The Antichrist is the sacrificial mechanism counterfeiting the soteriological form. The Paraclete holds the hinge—forensic unmasking and, simultaneously, provision of the ontological alternative.
Image description
Extended description
and 2/ Ultimately, it transpires that the precarious thread of a 'transcendent falsehood' is all that secures the social bonding and psychological stability of societies complicit in collectively sanctioning 'morally-justified violence' against an internal scapegoat or foreign foe. Niebhur noted that not only is kindness no protection from the prey of delusion, but that kind folk, _especially_, underestimate their own capacity for self deception. Rohr, too, echoes Girard in noting the scapegoat mechanism as mimetic, unconscious, automatic and universal. Quote tweet: ‘Sacred violence provides the state with its legitimacy and fuels the optimism and idolatry of the patriot. It sanctions the judiciary, justifies class distinctions, bestows privilege on the ‘best people’ and dignifies the executioner.’ - Robert Hamerton-Kelly 4/ Subtweet: "Perhaps the clearest sign that we’re making progress will be when more policy proposals sincerely surprise us.” The contagion, now globally self-justifying. As Girard intuited, such totalizing, mimetic escalation ultimately warrants conclusive intervention at a planetary level.
Open original document22/ Jesus keeps saying his disciples do not hear him. Not because his message lacks coherence, but because messianic disclosure unseats hearing itself, dissolving both worldly reduction and religious fetishism at once—twin evasions of what obedience to love actually costs.
Image description
Original X alt text
Copy of tweet here: The psychodynamics of religious fascism are self-sealing, generating ultimacy through a chronic moral inversion—victim-vanishing bearing the contradictions of the whole. And because invisibility is constitutive, "reform" lands as a category error. Hence: no reform, only rupture.