The Epic Of Gilgamesh: Ethics And Values Through Religious Perspective

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Ethics and Values Through Religious Perspective Have you ever taken a moment to think of how and why people live and interact as they do? Why do we make decisions and what underlying morals lead us throughout our lives? Throughout the years humankind has evolved and changed many of the ways in which they view the world and much of this has to do with their religious standpoint. Because people often rely so heavily on religion it has been known to be the most widely used way of passing down ethics and moral to children throughout the centuries. Cultures have been using religious standpoints as a way to articulate morality and ethical values as far back as humankind can recall. For example the excerpt from the Bible; Genesis. Genesis …show more content…

Although this excerpt is taken from The Epic of Gilgamesh, this is relevant to both early Mesopotamian culture as well as later Buddhist cultures. In early Mesopotamian cultures, people sought the meaning of life through storytelling. These stories were passed on through generations in the way of an epic. “An epic is a long narrative poem that celebrates the deeds of a legendary hero” (Gilgamesh, 8). In this case The Epic of Gilgamesh tells us of a man who seeks out immortality because he is afraid of what the afterlife has to offer …show more content…

Siddhartha was a man of high caste who was born and raised in a palace. When he grew older he learned of the suffering of the world and decided to go out and learn why these things happen to us. In this text Siddhartha, later known as “the Buddha, the Awakened, or the Enlightened one”(The Buddha, 78) tells us of what 's called the middle path. The Buddha explains to his monks that in order to follow this path “We must give up two extremes of the natural world, that of pleasure and and a life given to mortification” (The Buddha, 79). The Buddhists believed that the world is full of pain and suffering, and when we die we are only to be born again as something else depending on one 's Karma. Causing people to forever have to relive the suffering of existence. Because of this they felt that the way that they lived their lives would determine what they were reborn as and if they succeeded in reaching Nirvana , an end to desire and suffering (Hill, 02/03). “And this knowledge and insight arose in my mind: The emancipation of my mind cannot be lost; this is my last birth; hence i shall not be born again!”(The Buddha,

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