English :: essays papers

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.