A semester in 5 jumbled Paragraphs, YA!

In the Introduction Unit we learned about the beginning of humans. According to the bible in Genesis, God created Man on the sixth day. Genesis 2:7 says-"the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being." This is very similar to many other creation stories, a human figure created from mud or clay and breathed into life. We did not just look at religion though, but where the idea of religion came from. Karen Armstrong talked of this and where religion, specifically myth, came from. Myth came from imagination which is unique to humans. These myths gave life meaning and explained the unexplainable, like death. Armstrong said, "Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words." Is that not what religion does? It is there, whether it is by the Greek who used to explain everyday things, or todays Christianity to explain what is supposed to happen after death. These myths lead to symbols and art and Sporre talked of the evolution of the symbols as humans themselves evolved. Symbols started to appear as early as 250,000 years ago. Eventually Homosapiens appeared and they made art. They made jewelry, sculptures, engravings and drawings and also had bone whistles and flutes. Homosapiens are the people of today. Today we make art which reflects on religion among many other things.
The aborigines of Australia use art to portray their religious animal figures. They also have sacred spaces, several of them. In general, everywhere is sacred, but there are some exceptionally sacred places. One is a sacred cave where men can go to perform rituals and to become men. By doing this they paint the outline of their hand on the wall of the cave. The other very sacred space is where they put the bones of their dead. They put these bones in a boulder with a hole in it. They believe by putting the bones of their dead in this places that the souls of the people will pass into Dreamtime, something that is like an afterlife. These aborigines live in the nature, just like Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell was the main character of a documentary by Werner Herzog. Treadwell lived in Alaska with wild bears learning from them and about them and from them. He believed that nature (this includes the bears) was innocent and need to be protected, especially the bears. The director, Herzog, thought different. He thought that nature was evil and dangerous. Treadwell took his work very seriously and lived very close to them. He was eventually killed by a bear. This, for Herzog, confirmed what he thought of nature. In The Tempest by William Shakespeare the main character, Prospero, is a magician and can control things nature. Prospero used to be a duke and now he thinks that its time that his daughter, Miranda, got married, but because they live on an island, there is only a slave/servant man there named Caliban. So, Prospero uses his magic to make a tempest to sink a boat near his island so Miranda will have someone. Prospero set her up with a prince from the boat, Caliban bans together from someone from the boat to kill Prospero so they can rule the island, but they fail. Miranda and Ferdinand, the prince, plan to get married and the play ends happily with everyone leaving the island to go back to Naples. Religion, like the sacred space, is important to humans, without it there would be nothing to explain what happens after we die. Nature also plays a large role in being human, how it can cause love, like watching the sun set or picking flowers. This also shows how unpredictable and dangerous nature can be with Treadwell dying.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is about a man named Dorian Gray who is corrupted by a friend of his names Lord Henry. Lord Henry teaches him to be vain. Then a painting is made of him where his soul is put into the painting so that the painting will age and not him. He becomes a horrible person, but never ages and people love him. He eventually murders his friend who made the painting. He eventually sees what he has become and goes up to get rid of his painting, which is in hiding. He goes up to get rid of it and goes to stab it. The next day Dorian is found in the room, old and wrinkled with a knife in his heart. Moving on from one sad case to another, the movie All the Mornings of the World a man names Sainte Colombe plays the viol. When his wife dies he becomes severely depressed and starts to write loads of music, none of which he publishes. He gets a student eventually who falls in love with his daughter. He tells him to go away because he does not FEEL the music so the daughter teaches him. He becomes a famous teacher and player, and eventually learns to feel the music like Sainte Colombe. Speaking of love, in class we went over some Egyptian love poems. They talk of the beauty of a woman using nature as metaphors. "Her face is like a snare in a forest of meryu / And I, a poor wild goose, / A poor wild goose drawn down / to take the bait." This woman drawn this man in like a snare might draw a goose in. The bait I think is like her beauty. Dorian shows that beauty isn’t everything by how his soul became blackened, Sainte Colombe showed how strong love can be and its influence on music, and how nature again can influence love.
In class we learned about the Ten Commandments, The Holiness Code, and the Buddhist Eight Fold Path. All three of these have some similar views. These similar views or laws could be called universal laws. Things like: do not lie, do not steal, and do not murder. Others that aren’t eh same and are specific for the religion are things like in the Ten Commandments, No Gods before me, or the Eight Fold Path's thought of Right Mindfulness. The universal law of do not murder does not apply to one man though, and his name is Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov is the main character in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. He got the idea in his head that some people are better than others and that this difference makes certain things, like murder, not apply to them. He believes that he is this type of person and because of this he goes out and murders a woman and robs her. He does this because he is incredibly poor and she was a horrible person so he thought it was alright to take her life. The guilt eats him alive and makes him physically sick. A girl he falls in love with eventually gets him to confess, not only to the cops but to the public. He goes to jail but she waits for him. In the book Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut a man dies. He not only dies though, he decides not to move on and stays on earth as a spirit. He watches as the world is bombed and the human race changes. It evolves from what we know to a seal type creature. This narrator, Leon, watches as the human races evolves over one million years. When he dies his father told him to enter the light and join him in the afterlife. Leon refuses, and his father says he won’t be back in one million years, and in that time he watches the human race come under economic stress and die except for a select few who evolve into aquatic mammals. Raskolnikov showed that no one person is better than another, and that all ethics apply to everyone equally. The universal laws show what people are supposed to abide, and Galapagos showed the human frailty, how people were driven out of being human and became an entirely new species.
In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare three men want revenge. Hamlet wants to avenge his father’s death, Laertes his father, and Fortinbras his father. The play ends with everyone getting what they want, but also getting somewhat dead. Hamlet and Laertes both avenge their father’s deaths; Hamlet kills Claudius and Laertes killed Hamlet. Hamlet ends up killing Laertes before he dies himself from the poison sword. All three men die, and the queen does too, though her death has nothing to do with any revenge. As Hamlet is dying he tells Horatio that he wants the land (for the king and the heir not going to live to rule) to go to Fortinbras. Gilgamesh is the name of a man who is two-thirds god and one-third man. He goes on some epic adventures with his friend Enkidu. They go out to make a name for themselves. Gilgamesh doesn’t want to be forgotten. He fears death and what it brings so he goes and does all these amazing things so that he will forever be remembered. Enkidu eventually dies and Gilgamesh morns the loss of his friend and looks for a cure to aging. All of these treks have dreams that foretell what is going to happen on the journey. Similar to those dreams is the movie Waking Life which is about a young man who is dreaming. He continuously dreams. There is an idea that when someone is dreaming that they are part of a collected consciousness. This being said, it was also said that once someone dies they join that consciousness forever. By this I mean that they are in a continuous dream state, one that they cannot wake up from. It is a very interesting concept. The inner journey of Gilgamesh relates to the many inner journeys many different people have. Hamlet shows that revenge isn’t everything in human existence and Waking Life shows that what we may take for reality may just be a dream.