Does religion give rise to violence, or the other way around?

c. 2015 Religion News Service

(RNS) It’s often argued that religion gives rise to violence. But what if it were really the other way around? What if violence actually gave rise to religion?

So argued the French anthropologist and philosopher René Girard, who died Nov. 4. Described as the “Darwin of the human sciences,” he was elected to the French Academy in 2005 for his seminal theories of sacred violence.