Scimitar - Primitive Sacred

The primitive Sacred, regardless of its location in the world - Iraq, Detroit, you name it - sees violence as a perfectly acceptable means to its ends. Case in point: Christians in Iraq make perfect victims, reports Jennifer Green in The Ottawa Citizen:

The Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Church of the East are among the Christian churches in Iraq.

Today, about 300,000, or one in three, is a refugee, he said.

"It's at a crisis point," Mr. Isaac's colleague, Zaya Oshana, said later. "Christians will be completely annihilated."

Since the war began in 2003, about 12 children, many as young as 10, have been kidnapped and killed, then nailed to makeshift crosses near their homes to terrify and torment their parents.

One infant was snatched, decapitated, burned and left on his mother's doorstep ...

Scapegoating is the essential component to the primitive Sacred, the "least common denominator" of social agreement and cohesion. "It's HIS fault," is the accusatory gesture and/or declarative sentence that pulls disparate peoples together where there had been no cohesion, no agreement.

In Iraq and elsewhere, where there has been little influence of the Gospel with its concern for victims of violence, the spirit of the primitive Sacred still serves as a realtime generator of violence reduction between potentially warring peoples; i.e., the Sunnies and Shia. If we might tear each other apart, if we can find a "black sheep" upon whom we can both agree can serve as a lightning rod for the animosity we would otherwise heap on each other, we have a stop gap violence reduction mechanism.

Never mind the fate of that scapegoat. Our Lord's question, "Can Satan cast out Satan?" is expository and rhetorical. Of course Satan can. And does. Etymologically, "satan" means "the accuser." The satanic principle is the heart of the primitive Sacred. It is alive and well in the world today in neo-paganism and the Scimitar.