Satan and scandal thus overlap, but scandal describes primarily the process of desiring, then stumbling over models who are rivals and obstacles, and finally assigning blame, which leads to victimization. Satan describes primarily the mechanism of accusing and lynching a victim. Satan and scandal are key terms for understanding mythology.

The reversal of the relation of innocence and guilt between victims and executioners is the keystone of biblical inspiration.

Both political correctness and victimism stem from an authentic reality from the standpoint of the Christian faith. That reality is God's revelation through Jesus Christ of the victim mechanism and the way into God's new community of love and nonviolence. But Satan has a tremendous ability to adapt to what God does and to imitate God, and so

Collective murder, or the single victim mechanism, has everything to do with the origin of the texts that do not represent it and cannot represent it precisely because they are based on it, because the victim mechanism is their generating principle. These texts are the myths.

Once we apprehend the biblical criticism of mimetic contagion and its results, we can understand the biblical profundity of the talmudic principle that Emmanuel Lévinas often cites: “If everyone is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent.” Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is

The more desperately we seek to worship ourselves and to be good “individualists,” the more compelled we are to worship our rivals in a cult that turns to hatred.

The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.

THUS THE EXPRESSION “scapegoat” designates (1) the victim of the ritual described in Leviticus, (2) all the victims of similar rituals that exist in archaic societies and that are called rituals of expulsion, and finally (3) all the phenomena of nonritualized collective transference that we observe or believe we observe around us.

How then should one explain the universal presence of religion, supposedly so useless, right at the heart of all human institutions? When this question is asked in a rationalist context, there is only one really logical response, that of Voltaire: religion is defined as a parasite that attaches itself from outside to useful institutions. “Deceitful