Expulsion
EXPULSION. Expulsion can be harmful but also beneficial, depending on the purposes toward which it is directed. Associated concepts are alienation, banishment, excommunication, exile, exorcism, expurgation, purification, repentance, scapegoating, defilement, and cleansing. Greeks, Romans, and Indians practiced expulsion as a means of exerting social control over individuals or groups over millennia. Against that cultural background, religious communities adopted and adapted expulsion to their own purposes and provided some of the most dramatic instances of one or another form of expulsion.
The story in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible of Yahweh sending Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as punishment for their disobedience of his commands is an archetypal story of expulsion that is widely known, particularly in the West. One widespread and persistent interpretation of the story asserts that ever since that momentous expulsion humans have been estranged and alienated from their proper relationship with the divine. Religious communities often seek to provide means to restore the relationship, sometimes through rituals, sometimes through recommended ethical behaviors, sometimes through doctrines said to articulate the proper understanding of the divine-human relationship to which intellectual assent by believers is required.
Further narratives abound in the literature of many other religions indicating that similar experiences occur within their residual memories of the realm of human relations as individuals are estranged from and by other individuals.
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