practice write 7
Jan. 29th, 2008 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chu_totoroas per usual, got lazier and lazier towards the end. don't read if you're christian.
Religion + Hypocrisy = Religious Hypocrisy
Religion. By the Webster Dictionary: “A set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law.” From the same source, then, hypocrisy reads: “The act of pretending to support a belief or behavior while holding the opposite beliefs or behaviors at the same time.” Now, combine the two and readers can easily infer religious hypocrisy, the act of pretending to support a set of common beliefs and practices while actually contradicting them, in thought, behavior, or both. In many religions, notably Christianity, this refers to inconsistency between religious and ethical values. Some obvious violations, such as crusades to obliterate the Muslims (contradicts “Thou shalt not kill”; further contradicts “Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God” in attempting to justify “Thou shalt not kill”), have occurred time and again throughout the course of history, though ignorant malpractices by the average citizen were also common, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Exodus 20:7, 13). American satirist Mark Twain notes this in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and ridicules it through his portrayal of the conduct of various supporting characters.
Two prime examples of this are the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who represent the typical middle-class housewives of the nineteenth century. They both repeatedly attempt to “sivilize” Huck and teach him religious values, yet Huck notices that while the widow forbids him to smoke, she takes snuff, “and of course that [is] all right, because she [does] it herself” (Twain 3). This little bit of irony goes whistling over the widow’s head several pages later, when she tells Huck to “help other people… and never think about [himself]” (10). Obviously the widow does not adhere to this rule. How can Huck be obliged to listen to her while she herself indulges in self-righteous snuffing? Another instance occurs when Huck goes to church with the Grangerfords, and both the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons “take their guns along… [keeping] them between their knees or [standing] them handy against the wall,” while at the same time listening to a sermon about “brotherly love” (91). Such hypocrisy confuses Huck, and may have contributed to his later decision to go to hell when he rips up a letter he writes to Miss Watson about Jim.
Oftentimes, Twain layers hidden implications through his description of a humorous event. When Jim complains of being tied up day and night, the duke thinks of a solution: he dresses Jim up in a ridiculous costume, paints his “hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue,” and labels him: “Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head” (130). A major teaching of Christianity is the acts of kindness and mercy to other men, which supposedly determines where one’s soul will land on judgment day (which, by all rights, should have passed in the year 2000, but for some reason or the other keeps getting postponed). However, readers see here an irrational fear and belittlement of other cultures, affording them next to no respect. In fact, xenophobia dates back to as early as the 1600s, as Ms. Mary Rowlandson can testify. Before she had ever seen an Indian in her life, she had often declared, “If the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive,” under the conception that the Indians were barbaric savages that would do anything to achieve their means (Rowlandson 85). After being kidnapped by them and traveling with them for three months, she writes, astonished, that “not one of them ever offered the least abuse or unchastity to [her] in word or action” (90).
The most drastic of these cases must be the division of man to man by color of the skin. When Huck relates to Aunt Sally that there’s been an accident on a boat, she exclaims:
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No'm. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” (Twain 185)
Is a nigger, then, not a man? Why, of course not. He may be intelligent and sentient and homo sapien in stem-cell structure down to the deoxyribose nucleic acid, but he has black skin, so he must be an… un-man. And if he is an un-man, it must be all right to whip him, to mistreat him, to enslave him! It follows that un-men need not learn to read, and should be “narrowly watched in all [their] movements” and “[rushed] at… with the utmost fury” if discovered attempting to civilize himself (Douglas 332). Who knows, perhaps the Christians’ “jealous God” envies the black man’s beautiful nigrescent skin (Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 4:24).
Whatever the reason, readers now understand the regularity with which religious hypocrisy was practiced in the centuries of American settlement before the Civil War, almost more than religion itself. The South, in particular, reveled in it, vigorously enslaving the negroes and using them to its own advantage. In fact, modern America still reflects such roots. False prophets abound, thoughtlessly abusing the Lord’s name as justification to go to war, claiming that the Lord needs “sacrifice” to accomplish His wishes, and breathing not a word about his Lord’s desire for oil. Alas.
...in other news, afternoon naps disorient me so bad. You have no idea. @___@
Religion + Hypocrisy = Religious Hypocrisy
Religion. By the Webster Dictionary: “A set of common beliefs and practices generally held by a group of people, often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law.” From the same source, then, hypocrisy reads: “The act of pretending to support a belief or behavior while holding the opposite beliefs or behaviors at the same time.” Now, combine the two and readers can easily infer religious hypocrisy, the act of pretending to support a set of common beliefs and practices while actually contradicting them, in thought, behavior, or both. In many religions, notably Christianity, this refers to inconsistency between religious and ethical values. Some obvious violations, such as crusades to obliterate the Muslims (contradicts “Thou shalt not kill”; further contradicts “Thou shalt not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God” in attempting to justify “Thou shalt not kill”), have occurred time and again throughout the course of history, though ignorant malpractices by the average citizen were also common, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Exodus 20:7, 13). American satirist Mark Twain notes this in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and ridicules it through his portrayal of the conduct of various supporting characters.
Two prime examples of this are the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who represent the typical middle-class housewives of the nineteenth century. They both repeatedly attempt to “sivilize” Huck and teach him religious values, yet Huck notices that while the widow forbids him to smoke, she takes snuff, “and of course that [is] all right, because she [does] it herself” (Twain 3). This little bit of irony goes whistling over the widow’s head several pages later, when she tells Huck to “help other people… and never think about [himself]” (10). Obviously the widow does not adhere to this rule. How can Huck be obliged to listen to her while she herself indulges in self-righteous snuffing? Another instance occurs when Huck goes to church with the Grangerfords, and both the Grangerfords and the Sheperdsons “take their guns along… [keeping] them between their knees or [standing] them handy against the wall,” while at the same time listening to a sermon about “brotherly love” (91). Such hypocrisy confuses Huck, and may have contributed to his later decision to go to hell when he rips up a letter he writes to Miss Watson about Jim.
Oftentimes, Twain layers hidden implications through his description of a humorous event. When Jim complains of being tied up day and night, the duke thinks of a solution: he dresses Jim up in a ridiculous costume, paints his “hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue,” and labels him: “Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head” (130). A major teaching of Christianity is the acts of kindness and mercy to other men, which supposedly determines where one’s soul will land on judgment day (which, by all rights, should have passed in the year 2000, but for some reason or the other keeps getting postponed). However, readers see here an irrational fear and belittlement of other cultures, affording them next to no respect. In fact, xenophobia dates back to as early as the 1600s, as Ms. Mary Rowlandson can testify. Before she had ever seen an Indian in her life, she had often declared, “If the Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken alive,” under the conception that the Indians were barbaric savages that would do anything to achieve their means (Rowlandson 85). After being kidnapped by them and traveling with them for three months, she writes, astonished, that “not one of them ever offered the least abuse or unchastity to [her] in word or action” (90).
The most drastic of these cases must be the division of man to man by color of the skin. When Huck relates to Aunt Sally that there’s been an accident on a boat, she exclaims:
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No'm. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.” (Twain 185)
Is a nigger, then, not a man? Why, of course not. He may be intelligent and sentient and homo sapien in stem-cell structure down to the deoxyribose nucleic acid, but he has black skin, so he must be an… un-man. And if he is an un-man, it must be all right to whip him, to mistreat him, to enslave him! It follows that un-men need not learn to read, and should be “narrowly watched in all [their] movements” and “[rushed] at… with the utmost fury” if discovered attempting to civilize himself (Douglas 332). Who knows, perhaps the Christians’ “jealous God” envies the black man’s beautiful nigrescent skin (Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 4:24).
Whatever the reason, readers now understand the regularity with which religious hypocrisy was practiced in the centuries of American settlement before the Civil War, almost more than religion itself. The South, in particular, reveled in it, vigorously enslaving the negroes and using them to its own advantage. In fact, modern America still reflects such roots. False prophets abound, thoughtlessly abusing the Lord’s name as justification to go to war, claiming that the Lord needs “sacrifice” to accomplish His wishes, and breathing not a word about his Lord’s desire for oil. Alas.
...in other news, afternoon naps disorient me so bad. You have no idea. @___@
