'Change' as Sacrificial Code Word

In the post, Who’s Your Daddy, I review the way that Jesus reveals the "father" of his interlocutors in John's Gospel, chapter 8. By their surreptitious inferences, Jesus sees that they are using their spiritual ancestry as a cover for their ostensible goal: claiming Abraham as their forebear, they bait and switch so that they set trip-wires to catch him and brand him as a certifiable "sinner". But they do not want to show him the "errors" of his ways. They want to find cause to scapegoat him. In this way, they show their true "father".

"You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning ... he is a liar and the father of lies" [Jn 8,44, my emphases]

Jesus offers a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of "father". His Father is not part of the primitive Sacred; rather, this Father is willing, in the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son, to undergo suffering and ultimately murder at the hands of bloodthirsty humanity to prove and vindicate His innocence - what the prophets of the Old Testament were already prophesying to a wayward, covenant-breaking people.

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The West is a product of this biblical spirit, leading away from the primitive Sacred and its satanic ways. But since the Renaissance and so-called "enlightenment", it has been moving back toward the ways of paganism.

Part of the West's crisis is that we have separated ourselves from the crowd; we are suspicious of crowds. And that is good: we know how crowds can turn on a victim and try collectively to scapegoat an arbitrarily chosen victim. This is what Hamerton-Kelly calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism" (GMSM). We value individualism to the point of worship: we have gone overboard to the point of caring little for the common good. Too, we even see the danger of the primitive Sacred in the "voice of the ancestral father."

So? So what? So the "voice of the ancestral father" presently is embodied in President George W. Bush. So we need CHANGE. Ah, (but) there's the rub.

If we do not choose the Father that Christ came to reveal, "change" leads merely and inexorably not to a way out of the "labyrinth" of the primitive Sacred. Change leads only to another curlicue of the labyrinth, as we follow a Pied Piper who fascinates us with his charisma.

What is a person who wants to follow the Father revealed by Jesus Christ to do this presidential election? The most ostensible form of the primitive Sacred is always child sacrifice. You may want, first, to check the voting records of candidates on abortion. Second, you may want to see which candidate lines up with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church's faith and morals. And, third, pray - pray fervently for the Culture of Life, that of Jesus' Father - in a culture fast slipping back into the ways of the primitive Sacred.