31 definitions
Belief (n.) in every representation and belief in none come to the same thing: faith and blanket scepticism both shield the founding violence from real critique.
Biblical scholarship (n.) is stranger in its blindness than anthropology: it holds the key to every interpretation in the very text it studies, and declines to use it.
Christianity (n.) is the only religion still fair game for ridicule among intellectuals — and the only one that says something other than violence.
Classification (n.) in ethnology sorts institutions like a postal clerk sorting mail — and quietly forgets whatever will not fit a pigeonhole.
The Curse (n.) in the Gospels is the opposite of a primitive curse: it calls down no god's vengeance, it simply hands violence back to those who did it.
Desire (n.) is better understood by so-called primitive peoples than by us: they see its tie to violence, which our ignorance keeps hidden.
The Divinity of Christ (n.) is no hyperbole or rhetorical overkill but the only fit answer to a constraint: knowledge of violence that men could not have produced alone.
Education (n.) rests on the capacity for imitation, as do apprenticeship and initiation — witness how hard it is for those born deaf to learn their mother tongue.
Founding murder (n.) cannot be witnessed — not by accident but by logic: the only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such.
God (n.) never pleases us: show people Yahweh's interventions and they cry out for a God who stays out of it, and vice versa — like the frogs never content with their king.