Scape-swine (Mark 5:1-20)

We can almost hear the swine of Mark 5 cascading in shock and fear down cliffs to drown. The musk of semen, the reek of urine, and the odor of brain matter saturate all of these tales. So often religion becomes sanitized and dehumanized, made clinical and airless by apologetical attempts to prove some grand unifying point. But at their root they are about human hope and community, about social expectations and in-group signaling. When we look at faith traditions from this perspective, we can see how they reveal parts of the human story and clarify some of the motivations of the human mind.