Johnathan at Limbo — Interpreting Girard Lecture V Transcript

0:00:11.7 DP: When I was a kid, I used to march around my religious studies classes thinking I was brilliant for rejecting biblical ideas. I used to say things like, "Moses didn't really part the Red Sea" or "Cain and Abel weren't real historical figures," and “These stories didn't literally happen.” And so, I dismissed them for decades. But discovering Girard was a turning point for me, and I started taking the Bible seriously, if not literally. For example, Girard showed me how the same Cain and Abel story that I'd always dismissed revealed a pattern of mimetic rivalry that was showing up in my own life. And whether literal or not, I saw how these stories spoke to the constants in the human condition. Furthermore, I learned how every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian thinking. And Girard shows us that even secular philosophical assumptions of modernity, like say -- the concern for victims -- are Christian through and through. And to the extent that Christian ideas like comp

0:00:11.7 DP: When I was a kid, I used to march around my religious studies classes thinking I was brilliant for rejecting biblical ideas. I used to say things like, "Moses didn't really part the Red Sea" or "Cain and Abel weren't real historical figures," and “These stories didn't literally happen.” And so, I dismissed them for decades. But discovering Girard was a turning point for me, and I started taking the Bible seriously, if not literally. For example, Girard showed me how the same Cain and Abel story that I'd always dismissed revealed a pattern of mimetic rivalry that was showing up in