violence/non-violencecriteria depend on whether or not something possesses a karmic life,
which in turn depends on two criteria: sentience and ontological indi-
viduality. A cow or a horse is ontologically distinct from bacteria or
micro-organisms. Moreover, only sentient life is karmic and possesses
intrinsic worth, whereas non-karmic life is merely instrumental. Because
of their conviction that all things possess souls, Jains practice non-vio-
lence to all living things. Jain monks, for instance, filter their drinking
water in order to avoid consuming any small bodies, and they sweep the
road along which they are walking to avoid harming any creature. It is
this spirit of non-violence that later influences Mahatma Gandhi’s advo-
cacy of the practice within the struggle for independence.
According to the Christian realist Jacques Ellul, violence is pervasive
in all cultures and time periods because all states are founded by violence
and maintain their existence through it. He agrees with Thomas Hobbes’s
belief that violence is the natural condition of society. Ellul expounds
five laws of violence: (1) certainty; (2) reciprocity, which means that
violence begets more violence; (3) sameness, which means that one can-
not distinguish between justified and unjustified violence; (4) violence
begets violence and nothing else; and (5) a person who uses violence
always attempts to justify both it and themselves. To counter this perva-
sive violence, Ellul offers the violence of love that demands that the
other live, rejects victory, excludes physical or psychological violence,
and is based on a faith in the possibility of a miracle.
In contrast to the hopeful position of Ellul for combating violence, René
Girard perceives an inseparable relationship between violence and the
sacred. Since humankind is by nature violent and vengeance characterizes
human relationships, it is essential for the survival of society to find a
process which can break the repetitive and destructive cycle of violence.
It is religion in the form of sacrifice, a faithful replica of an original act of
violence, which shelters humans from violence by channeling it toward a
victim whose death provokes no reprisals or recurrent reciprocal vio-
lence. Thus, by means of sacrifice, a community is able to subdue the
destructive forces that can potentially pull apart the social fabric.
Human violence and killing of some victim is grounded in mimetic
desire, which suggests that humans do not know what to desire, and they
turn to others to help them decide from Girard’s perspective. This process
of imitation creates the potential for violent conflict because of competi-
tion for the same object. Thus society controls individual desires either
negatively by means of prohibitions and taboos or positively by the
intrinsic desirability of certain objects and forms of behavior. Violence is
a continuation of mimetic desire. It is religion that channels violence and
protects the community from self-annihilation.