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Recommended: Puritans analysis
English
It's easy to tell the difference from right and wrong. It's just like telling the difference between dark and light. But what if you grew up in the dark not knowing there was a light, then you'd only think in one direction. "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right." Society usually thinks in one way, only the intelligent and gifted few can think outside of the box, outside of how society views the world. They follow their hearts to decide what is right and wrong. They come from the dark but are able to see the light.
One of the intelligent and gifted few is Jonathan Edwards who wrote Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God. In this writing he talks about how men are sinners and how they need to start living their lives according to the bible. Sin was always a big issue for the puritans because they believed that men were born sinners. In his Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, he mentions "their foot shall slide in due time" meaning that men stand on slippery ground. He describes of the sinner as a loathsome spider suspended by a slender thread over a pit of seething brimstone. And that "there is no fortress that is any defense against the power of god." Meaning that you cannot escape God no matter what you do and that helped awaken the people of the evil things they do.
The Colonial Era had views such as that. They lived their lives as well as they can, but they were doing something wrong. They were being hypocrites. They didn't exactly follow through what a good Christian should do. They showed discrimination against other backgrounds, they used suspicion as means of law (an example would be witch craft trials). This train of thought later changed as the Age of Reason came.
In the Age of Reason, one of the primary goals was to abolish the ignorance in men. In Benjamin Franklin's the Temple of Learning, he mentions in a dream where people visited the Temple of Learning "that the whole tribe who entered into the temple with me, began to climb the throne; but the work proving troublesome and difficult most of them, they withdrew their hands from the plow, and concentrated themselves to sit at the foot, with madam idleness and her maid ignorance.
In his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, by Jonathan Edwards he displays the Puritan belief that men are saved by grace. Edward, however, use rhetorical devices to make his sermon persuasive by using vibrant images and figure of speech to make these men repent.
In the 1700’s the Puritans left England for the fear of being persecuted. They moved to America for religious freedom. The Puritans lived from God’s laws. They did not depend as much on material things, and they had a simpler and conservative life. More than a hundred years later, the Puritan’s belief toward their church started to fade away. Some Puritans were not able to recognize their religion any longer, they felt that their congregations had grown too self-satisfied. They left their congregations, and their devotion to God gradually faded away. To rekindle the fervor that the early Puritans had, Jonathan Edwards and other Puritan ministers led a religious revival through New England. Edwards preached intense sermons that awakened his congregation to an awareness of their sins. With Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” he persuades the Puritans to convert back to Puritanism, by utilizing rhetorical strategies such as, imagery, loaded diction, and a threatening and fearful tone.
Edwards, who also had Puritan beliefs, was a philosopher and theologian and his way of thinking was more in-depth and complex. He used repetition to drive his sermons home and convinced his congregations of the evils and wickedness of hell through the use of intense analogies. His “fire and brimstone” way of preaching frightened people and made them feel a deep need for salvation. Edwards believed that all humans were natural sinners and God was eagerly awaiting to judge them. He wrote "their foot shall slide in due time" meaning that mankind was full of inevitable sinners.
The First Chapter of The Puritan Family explains to the reader the rather "backwards" Puritan mindset that a man must be destined for salvation if he commanded good social conduct. That is, he was conducting himself in such a way because he was to be saved (the conduct being the result of this salvation). Many, if not all, Christians today believe, however, that salvation would be a result of conduct - that one will be saved if one has lived a just and moral life, unlike the Puritan converse - "one must be living justly and morally because one ...
First of all, Puritans believed that as an effect of Adam and Eve’s original sin, every person is born a sinner. For starters, in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, although it was written in 1952, he went through extreme
Religious conscience in America has evolved considerably since the first settlers emigrated here from Europe. Primary settlements were established by Puritans and Pilgrims who believed "their errand into the wilderness [America] was above all else a religious errand, and all institutions - town meeting, school, church, family, law-must faithfully reflect that fact" (Gaustad 61). However, as colonies grew, dissenters emerged to challenge Puritan authority; indeed, many of them left the church to join untraditional religious sects such as "the Ranters, the Seekers, the Quakers, the Antinomians, and the Familists" (Westbrook 26). Debates over softening the stance on tolerance in the church engendered hostility in many religious leaders, priming some officials to take action. Whether it was in direct response to "the liberalizing tendencies beginning to take hold in some [. . .] New England churches" (Westbrook 65), or a "reaction against the attempt in the Age of Reason to reduce Christian doctrine to rationalistic explanation" ("Great Awakening"), the Great Awakening impressed upon the issues of religious conscience. Moreover, what spawns from this controversy is a query over the juxtaposition of morality and spirituality: the question of whether these conditions are actually related. The gradual escalation of unconventional thinking in religious affairs facilitated new ideas on what defined spirituality; one religious theory, boosted by Thomas Paine and his book, The Age of Reason, denounced both Christianity and Atheism, proposing instead, a new concept: the middle path of Deism.
Francis Bacon opens his essay, "Idols of the Mind" by showing the reader that exploration, testing, and reason combined is that the solely way to really gain knowledge; only so much as the laws of nature are obeyed. He proceeds to introduce every of the four "idols of the mind": the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theatre, and why of these of those keeps humans from true understanding. Bacon speaks of the many ways that humans limit themselves in their minds and ways of thinking.
... live it, but in a way that if you are truly a Christian then you have all the freedom that you need. All the "bad" things will not appeal to you. All humans are born sinners, but I believe that you have the power to control your sin.
An example that shows that humans cannot distinguish right from wrong is when they were running in the winter so that the Russians would not find them. Everyone was very tired, and when they finally took a break, Elie dropped to the ground. Others piled on and the one on the bottom was Juliek. Elie was the only one who tried to move but he did not succeed. Just before his death, Juliek “play[ed] a fragment of a Beethoven concerto” (95). This showed Juliek’s innocence and soft heart. The others knew that there was somebody on the bottom, but were too fatigued to move and silently let Juliek die. They felt that they were right because they were just trying to in order for them to survive and recover from their suffering. However, they didn’t know or care that someone died because of their actions.
Even with all this knowledge it is still impossible to tell what truly is right or wrong. For centuries humans have pondered this and it at times seems we are no closer to the answer than we were the first time it was asked. It is up to each individual person to find the best way they can live and live it. No one is perfect and no two people are alike so the only way we as people can get close to true morality is to just be the best person we can be and hope everyone else decides to do the same. It sounds cheesy, but it really is the only way this world can get close to having true morals and understanding right and wrong.
The lines that define good and evil are not written in black and white; these lines tend to blur into many shades of grey allowing good and evil to intermingle with each another in a single human being. Man is not inherently good or evil but they are born innocent without any values or sense of morality until people impart their philosophies of life to them. In the words of John Locke:
Living in the United States as a Korean-American was not an easy task growing up. Sure I knew how to read and write English, but I did not know how to read, speak, and write my native language. It was difficult for me emotionally because I felt other people looked down on me especially Korean adults who often asked me why I did not know how to speak Korean in which I had no direct answer. "You should know how to at least speak Korean," they commonly spoke in a friendly tone, trying not to hurt my feelings. In my seventh grade year, I had the urge to take a step in order for me to fit in with the rest of my fellow peers, the Korean sub communities, and feel better about myself.
The world of Puritan New England, like the world of today, was filled with many evil influences. Many people were able to withstand temptation, but some fell victim to the dark side. Such offences against God, in thought, word, deed, desire or neglect, are what we define as sin (Gerber 14).
In conclusion, the advancement of these three philosophies from the theological Puritan views to the great scientific and reason ideals of the Enlightenment showed how a reform of beliefs and ideas resulted in the progressively modern ethics that our society is based on today. Scientific reasoning of the world ignited ideas that the ignorant society of the Puritans was immensely closed-minded about. These ideas gave way to how we explain how things happen through the use of science and reasoning. Though Puritans saw that this great reform was a blasphemy against God, the Enlightenment expanded different beliefs of religion which furthered societies intellect and understanding of religion. “The Age of Reasoning” was a radical new concept of human intellect that forever changed the ideas of our country which developed into who we are today.
Over the years English inarguably has reached a status of a global language and commonly is characterized as a lingua franca. It has become the language that is spoken by millions of people all over the world; as the mother tongue, as the language used for international communication and as the language learned in the millions of schools.