John Ganz

I've not read the book, but does he describe being in the presence of God?

Or is it like Augustine's Confessions where he has this realization that his former life was deeply sinful?

I'm very sorry to have learned that because it's a totally repulsive prospect.

And I will never forget that.

I didn't know that.

But it doesn't surprise me.

I mean, like, you know, the professions of conservatives, the moral rectitude, everyone knows that's a hypocrisy.

Everyone knows they're just like everybody else.

Yes.

Okay.

So that's the other part of Gerard's philosophy.

He believes that basically society picks scapegoats and this is an outlet for aggression that would otherwise lead to kind of a universal civil war all the time.

So we've scapegoat people and his solution is like, well, he thinks Jesus was scapegoated, but he was the one person who was totally innocent.

So therefore it revealed the mechanism of scapegoating, so on and so forth.

What I think that people like Thiel and Vance take from Girard is not, in order to be good Christians, in order to be good people, we ought not to scapegoat.

They say, well, that's kind of the way the world works, so we're going to pick our own scapegoats, and we're just going to make the right people our scapegoating.

I don't think the man who repeated the slander against Haitians eating cats, I don't think that person really can say with a lot of sincerity that they're against –

scapegoating so i think that essentially that's another side of the cynicism is that gerard gives them a picture of the world of a humanity that's irrational competitive prone to violence naturally scapegoats people and then gerard himself says well this is why christianity is necessary and why you know there is an escape from this

But they sort of say, well, that's just sort of the way things are.

Yeah, and it works.