The Importance of Purchasing Pleasure With Pain

In Leviticus, Aaron takes two goats that presumably would have otherwise been used by the Israelites for milk, meat, wool or leather. The good goat goes to god; the other goat symbolically invests with all of the sins of all of the people of Israel. Everything bad that everybody ever did now gets blamed on this one goat and he releases it into the wilderness like throwing trash into a dump. That's the escaped goat. A perfectly good goat that you really rather would have eaten but you figure hey, if this goat can carry away all of your sins and bad feelings then write off the loss.