Volume 3, Issue 4, April 1995

CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MYTH

A recent book by Roberto Calasso, entitled, "The Ruin of Kasch", focuses on modern history since the French Revolution. His concern is our loss of respect for the cosmos. He tells us that at some point we lost touch with the gods. By the time the French Revolution had run its course, there was no longer a cosmos distinct from ourselves. We had become our own god, our own point of reference. Along the way we suppressed our religious, sacrificial relationship to the outside, the non-human. In the end the restraints of sacrifice and ritual have been displaced into the blind, secular experiments of politics, mass technology and mass killing.

Calasso points out how we have lost our sense of sacrifice, of giving up, and our awareness that we must always give something back to God or to nature. With the spectres of Hitler and Stalin and the modern world, "the first consequence of the eclipse of sacrifice will be that the world will be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being devoted to something else."

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"Religion NOW" is published in limited edition by the Rev. Ross E. Readhead, B.A., B.D., Certificate of Corrections, McMaster University, in the interest of furthering knowledge and participation in religion. Dialogue is invited and welcomed.