According to Girard, “religion is a mechanism by which humans defend themselves against their own violent natures”.  To Girard, we are, at our very core, violent; we can’t help it! So in order to dispel the violence we must have ritualistic acts or some other type of violent-like activity in order to project our aggression on to, rather then on to each other, other animals, etc. It is obvious to see what Girard thinks about violent films, video games and television; they are all outlets, they all allow us to project our violent urges onto/into something other than reality, and fulfill our ‘innate desires’.  Now, while I do believe that humans have a ‘violent’ side, if that is what you want to call it, I don’t know that it is as evilas Girard is making it seem. Going back to the beginning of man, we needed hunter qualities in order to survive. We were hunted, and we hunted. We needed to protect ourselves and some of those personality traits that are linked to a hunter/warrior can be seen as and considered violent. While we have evolved since then, our innate needs and reactions still come in to play, we are beings of survival and will do anything we need to do to keep our lineage going. If we feel threatened, we react, it is in our blood, but that this reaction is alwaysviolent, I am not so sure I agree. I also don’t know that I agree with the idea that just because I sometimes enjoy watching an ‘investigative’ show where they show dead bodies, fights, etc. that I am drawn to it because i need a release for my violent urges. It seems a little preposterous. . . but then again, another natural trait of humans is denial!

For the majority of this essay, Sam Gill discusses the initiation process of the Hopi people. He gives a detailed account of what happens, what they are made to believe, etc. This is all in hope of giving an example, an understandable experience of disenchantment. It did not take reading the entire play by play of the Hopi tradition to see how this disenchantment relates to several other religions and religion in virtual reality. The first thing I thought of was my own initiation and disenchantment that took place when I made my first communion and confirmation in the Catholic Church.  When receiving first communion in first grade, I made a shocking realization, the bread isn’t reallyGod! I mean, I guess in reality I knew that all along, but being so young, believing everything your parents and any adult/authority figure tells you, I just accepted it. But the day of my communion, I realized, it is not really God that I am eating, it couldn’t be, that would be gross. It seems silly to reiterate and say out loud but as a child it was quite strange to realize that something you believed, something you had been told, was actually not true. So what else was not true? This disenchantment happened again, although not quite so literally, at my confirmation in 10th grade. I suppose really it was a sequence of events and not so much the singular event in and of itself. Anyways, after confirmation you are seen (in the eyes of the church) as an adult. A mature religious adult who is capable of knowing right from wrong, good from bad, and making decisions about them. While I believe that the purpose of this ritual is to bring the individuals closer to the Lord and their church community, (and it did in some respects) it also brought me farther away, mentally, because I began to think critically about everything that I had learned up to this point. What did it all mean? How does it apply? Why? When? How? etc. etc. I had lost the beauty to just believe and have faith/trust in what had been told to me. The disenchantment had come full force. While I still believed in the higher power of God, I was not so sure about all the stories and rules that had governed my life thus far. I began to ask more questions. . . something which I feel one cannot do and keep enchantment alive. I think enchantment is somewhat a naive state and once an individual begins to contemplate more complexly on the topic, disenchantment is inevitable.