Susan Jacoby Wild Justice Analysis

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II. The Ethics of the Conflict
Revenge theorist Susan Jacoby writes in her book Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge that the history of vengeance committed in the name of God is not a function of any one religion but of the union of religious and political power; and the Christianity preached by Jesus makes abandonment of vengeance a condition of personal salvation; but the Christianity expounded by ecclesiastical authority has made vindictiveness a condition of institutional survival .
Robert Langdon recounts the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church called La Purga or The Purge, where the church branded 4 Illuminati scientists with the Cross to purge their sins, and after the branding they were murdered and their bodies were dropped in …show more content…

Erich Fromm writes that revenge can be differentiated from normal defensive aggression in two ways – first, it occurs after the damage has been done, and hence is not a defence against threat, but of a much greater intensity; and second, it is often cruel, lustful and insatiable, where the problem of vengeance is a social problem that must be resolved in the complex interaction between the victim, the perpetrator and the social group . Therefore the revenge of the Illuminati is an example of justice going awry and taking over when society’s institutions fail. Because when justice is not forthcoming from a higher authority, people will and do take justice into their own hands. Acts of vengeance are the result. Punishment through retaliation is the typical response to breaking the rules of justice.
In defence of the Illuminati violence criminologists like Marongiu and Newman in Vengeance: The fight against injustice observe that –
“all acts of vengeance arise from an elementary sense of injustice, a primitive feeling that one has been arbitrarily subjected to a tyrannical power against which one is powerless to act” …show more content…

The Illuminati seemed to follow the notion of the Abrahamic “eye for an eye” motto of revenge, while the Church eternally seemed to subscribe to Christ’s “whoever is not with me is against me”.
Dan Brown included Galileo and Milton in the Brotherhood of the Illuminati inspired by what Langdon recalls “Annibale Gatti's famous Galileo and Milton, which hung even now in the IMSS Museum in Florence” (112). It was revealed in the Vatican archives while perusing Galileo’s Diagramma della Verità or the Diagram of Truth that the clue to trace the ‘Path of Illumination’ and the location of the ‘Church of illumination’ took the shape of a four-lined poem written by John