Kennedi Santomenna - HUM 1020 - CRN 14242

Chapter 10: Religion

"The passion of belief, for some, outweighs everything else (10.1)."

I grew up unreligious and did not have a belief, nor did I try to believe. Religion has never resonated with me due to my very broad ideas and how I was raised. My parents never forced religion onto us. My grandmother and my uncle were highly religious and took my sisters and me to church. My uncle is highly religious, way more than my grandmother was. He would say grace at the table and preach every morning to my family. Religion, to him, is his whole life. He posts prayers and preaches to his audience every day. He swears that everything he does is in the name of God. Honestly, without my uncle's belief in God, I don't think I would recognize my uncle.

"Are suffering and pain also part of nature? Or are they, like change, an illusion (10.3)?"

In my opinion, pain is a universal experience. Pain, whether it is physical or mental, is something we need to learn. For instance, it is okay to let your baby fall when they take their first steps. It helps them learn how to get back up from where they are. Some parents even let their children cry to get them to fall asleep. So, in a way, it is a learning curve. Pain, mentally or physically, has taught me a lot about myself and how to overcome certain situations and scenarios. It may hurt in the beginning, but pain is temporary.

"In other words, evil was a synonym for disaster, or what people would consider disaster. It did not imply malicious intent (10.5)."

Nowadays the word evil means a super villian or an enemy of the good side. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the idea of being a rebel although I was not. I remember being almost to the brink of tears when in every movie the good side won. I never understood why I reacted this way, but I am assuming now that it was because they were never given a chance. In most cases, almost every case, the bad guys were victims of evil themselves, making them bad. Whenever there was a bully who had been bullied, chances the bullied became the bully. I watched that growing up and I realized that being evil was more or less like being hurt and protecting. That may not be the case all the time but to some degree it turned out that way.

References

Richard Paul Janaro & Thelma C. Altshuler, 2017, The Art of Being Human, 11th Edition